Data and analysis supporting: Quantifying aquatic plant commonness and cooccurrence across scales to support ecological understanding and management

These data and R statistical code support the publication, "Quantifying aquatic plant commonness and cooccurrence across scales to support ecological understanding and management," in Journal of Ecology. We analyzed aquatic plant surveys from 1,658 lakes across Minnesota and Wisconsin, USA, collected over two decades (2000-2022) and encompassing nearly one million sampling points. These data were collected by agency staff, consultants, researchers, and others who performed the thousands of aquatic plant surveys that enabled this work. For 106 focal taxa, we quantified commonness as occupancy (at regional and local scales) and cooccurrence as diversity fields (the mean species richness of lakes or sampling locations where each focal species occurred). We used statistical models that incorporated environmental, spatial, and temporal covariates to correct for biased sampling and isolate community processes from other influential factors, and leveraged the temporal span of the data to investigate interannual variability in commonness and cooccurrence.