Climate data
Climate data in the form of annual precipitation and mean annual
temperature were derived from flux tower data for each site. However,
some satellite sites did not have a flux tower to reference, and for
these sites we calculated the distance to the nearest weather station
collecting data for National Centers for Environmental Information
(NCEI) using the ‘GSOD’ package in R version 4.1.0 (R Core Team, 2021).
If there was a weather station closer than the core NEON site for that
location we used the auxiliary weather station data, otherwise we used
the core location’s tower data for these nearby satellite sites without
tower data from NEON. We derived temperature data for each site as the
mean annual temperature (ºC) from the nearest weather station.
Precipitation data for each site was compiled as annual precipitation
totals (mm/year).