2026-10-11T03:52:18Z https://www.scidb.cn/oai

10.57760/sciencedb.ecodb.00323 2026-06-16T09:17:37Z

2026-06-16 A dataset on leaf sizes of 335 woody species across China doi:10.57760/sciencedb.ecodb.00323 en This dataset comprises paired leaf area and fresh mass measurements for more than 157000 leaves from 335 woody species across China. Leaf samples were collected from 64 sites, spanning the land-sea gradient from Tianshan piedmonts to the Zhoushan Archipelago and the latitudinal gradient from Hainan Island to the Lesser Khingan Mountains. For each species, we sampled no fewer than 20 leaves from at least three individual plants at a particular site, with some species contributing up to more than 1000 leaves from 30 individual plants to the dataset. The 335 species were widely distributed across the phylogenetic breadth of dicotyledon, including 29 orders, 76 families and 184 genera. Among these, there were relatively ancient taxa such as Magnoliales and Ranunculaes, as well as recently diverged taxa such as Umbeliiflorae. These 335 species encompassed substantial diversity of plant functional groups, including 208 arbors and 127 shrubs, 222 evergreen and 113 deciduous species, 309 single- and 26 compound-leafed species. Among the 335 species, leaf area varied over almost four orders of magnitude, covering a wide range of leaf size spectrum except megaphylls (> 164 025 mm2). The dataset can be instrumental for exploring leaf design rules and their ecological significance, in terms of intra- and inter-specific leaf size variability, leaf area-fresh mass scaling, and the macroevolution and biogeographic zonation of leaf sizes. leaf size ; intraspecies variation; functional group; plant biogeography Lin Zhijie He Dong Zheng Liting Yan Enrong Chu Chengjin Liu Zhili Wei Xinzeng PUBLIC https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ dataset Science Data Bank