There is little information on how plants allocate phosphorus (P) and whether this changes on soils varying in P supply. We examined and contrasted the P allocation strategies of native plants in south-eastern Australia on soils derived from either P-poor sedimentary or P-rich igneous parent materials. We measured total leaf P and four leaf P fractions: inorganic phosphate (Pi), metabolite P, nucleic acid P, and lipid P on leaves as well as net photosynthesis.
The dataset contains one ASCII comma-delimited dataset for leaf phosphorus of native plants on different sites in Sydney and the Blue Mountains, and the different chemical fractions of phosphorus as well as photosynthesis for these species. Column titles in the data are Sample.ID, Site, Species, Replicate, Date.of.collection, Familyname, Family.type, Parent_mater, Parent_mat_type, SoilTotP, SoilTotalP, SoilTotalPavg, Photosynthesis, PPUE, TotalPconc, PiConc, MetabolicPconc, NucleicAcidPconc, LipidPconc, MetabolitePconc, and PoConc. In the columns, the word ‘Conc’ denotes concentration and has units of mg/g per unit dry mass of leaf. The value ‘NA’ in any cell indicates that data are not available.
