Abstract
Mountains in China are crucial for biodiversity conservation due to unique topography and climate, providing essential habitats and refugia for many plant species. Standardized open datasets along elevational gradients across multiple mountains remain limited. Here we used standardized field protocols to collect plant diversity data of 370 permanent sampling plots along elevations in 17 mountains. Species identity and abundance of all woody plants with ≥ 1 cm diameter at breast height were recorded. We calculated species-level basal area, abundance, and relative importance value for all plants, and separately for two vegetation layers. The dataset spans 46° longitude, 24° latitude, ranges from 166 to 3,835 m a.s.l., and includes 1,493 species from 121 families and 450 genera. It covers nearly all major ecosystems from tropical rainforests to tundra, providing baseline data for studying plant diversity changes along elevations and latitudes. This dataset enables direct comparisons across mountains, helping evaluate impacts of climate and land-use changes on species range shifts and ecosystem transitions, and inform conservation strategies for mountain ecosystems.
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Data availability
The dataset supporting this Data Descriptor has been deposited in Figshare and is publicly available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.30877097.
Code availability
No custom code was used to generate or process the data described in this study.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to all the field crews in 17 mountains to collect the data, including Kankan Shang, Lin Chen, Qingni Song, Mingshui Zhao, Xin Wang, Yuzhuo Wang, Ran Zhang, Jiaxin Kong, Xianyu Yang, Oukai Zhang, Xuan Lv, Jiale Chen, Yaoshun Lu, Hongwei Zhang, Luwen Ma, Li Shu, Pengcheng Liu, Fang Wang, Xiaofan Shang, Jingchao Zhao, Junhong Chen, Mufan Sun, Min Guan, Pu Zheng, Yuetong Wang, Li Huang and Xijin Zhang. This work is part of the BEST (Biodiversity along Elevational Gradients: Shifts and Transitions; https://BEST-mountains.org) research network. This work was supported by the Fund of CAS Key Laboratory of Forest Ecology and Silviculture, Institute of Applied Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (KLFES-2036, KLFES-2027), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31500355, 31670630, 32071652, 32101280, 32230067, 32271616, 32301401, 32401334, 32471623, 32471852, and 41671047), the Innovation Program of Shanghai Municipal Education Commission (2023ZKZD36), the Jiangxi Natural Science Foundation (20242BAB25345, to Zhaochen Zhang), the Special Funding for Guangxi Bagui Young Top Scholar (to Zhonghua Zhang), the Excellent Young Scientist Program of Liaoning province (2024JH3/10200024), and the Doctoral Start-up Foundation of Liaoning Province (2024010292-JH3/101).
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J.Z. conceived the idea for the project and compiled the data. All authors were involved in collecting datasets. The first draft, the figures and tables were produced by X.W. All authors discussed and commented on the manuscript and contributed to the revised versions.
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Wang, X., Chen, Y., Chen, Y. et al. Plant community data along elevational gradients in China’s 17 mountains.
Sci Data (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-06414-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-06414-6
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