Seasonal field burial reconfigures thermal germination responses and germination timing across a temperate desert-steppe flora
Description
This dataset and code archive supports a multispecies field-burial experiment examining how seasonal soil exposure changes seed germination responses in a temperate desert-steppe flora in Inner Mongolia, China. The study tested whether germination changes progressively with burial duration or instead varies among seasonal retrievals; whether thermal and water-potential responses shift together; whether burial alters germination timing independently of final germination; and whether seed mass, life history, and growth type explain interspecific variation after accounting for phylogenetic relatedness. We predicted that winter exposure would most strongly increase germination under cool temperatures and that daily germination trajectories would reveal burial effects not captured by final germination percentages. This archive contains the curated data and R code supporting analyses of seed germination responses during burial and retrieval across 50 plant species. It includes dish-level final germination records, daily germination observations under temperature and water-potential gradients, species trait and dormancy information, phylogenetic data, soil temperature and moisture records, derived environmental-exposure metrics, analysis panels, and source data for all main and supplementary figures. The R scripts in R_pipeline reproduce endpoint and niche-metric calculations, generalized linear mixed models, phylogenetic generalized least-squares models, discrete-time hazard analyses, model diagnostics, publication-quality figures, and ten supplementary tables. Scripts should be run sequentially from 00_config.R to 06_tables_supplement.R. Outputs are organized into curated data, intermediate tables, fitted models, figures, and manuscript tables within the df directory. The input directory contains the original dormancy audit and soil-monitoring workbook used to prepare the curated inputs.