Fig. 2: Spectral variation among plant communities captures differences in species composition.
From: Plant beta-diversity across biomes captured by imaging spectroscopy
a At each site, the average pairwise spectral distance among plots increases with their average pairwise taxonomic distance. Sites are ordered across a latitudinal gradient from north (dark colors) to south (light colors). The overall relationship between pairwise spectral and taxonomic distances across all NEON sites is displayed in golden color and dashed line (n = 13222, r2 = 0.18, b = 0.47, t13221 = 191.2, P < 0.001). Significance of the relationship between spectral and taxonomic distance was assessed using two-sided t-tests; the number of observations is indicated by the gray tiles in the background. b Covariance between plot-wise ordinations of mean spectra and plant species inventories per site. Colors represent different biomes and stars significance levels, ***P ≤ 0.001, **P ≤ 0.01, *P ≤ 0.05, no star and transparent shading indicates P > 0.05 (not significant). For site abbreviations see Supplementary Table 1, for statistics see Supplementary Tables 2, 3, for results per site see Supplementary Fig. 2.
