Untangling the web: How spider traits link with management practices in agroecosystems

This dataset accompanies the manuscript "Untangling the Web: How Spider Traits Link with Management Practices in Agroecosystems". It includes the raw input matrices used to explore the functional composition of spider communities across agroecological and conventional cereal fields in the Swiss lowlands. The dataset consists of four tables:(1) L_spiders: Relative abundances of 84 spider species across 22 field sites, derived from standardized multi-method sampling (pitfall traps, sweep netting, vacuum suctioning).(2) Q_traits: Functional traits of the observed spider species, including hunting guild, dispersal ability, vegetation stratum, preferred habitat, and body size.(3) R_filters: Site-level environmental and management variables such as pesticide input (TFI), nitrogen application, and landscape metrics.(4) R_veg: Local vegetation characteristics based on percentage cover of plant species per site. From this, community-weighted means (CWMs) for plant height, specific leaf area, and leaf nitrogen content, as well as Rao’s functional diversity (RaoQ), were computed. These data were prepared for RLQ and fourth-corner analyses to assess how spider traits respond to environmental filtering through direct and vegetation-mediated pathways.