What does it mean if ht=0 and shts=0?
Aariq opened this issue · 1 comments
In 2009 (and only 2009) there are a number of plants with a recorded height, shoot number, and inflorescence number of 0 (not NA). For example IDs 1137, 2189, 3422, 4664, 7161. Does this mean the plant wasn't found, or was found and had no above-ground biomass?
Talked with @embruna about this just now. 0 height and 0 shoots is possible when a plant has lost all aboveground parts, but is still clearly alive (maybe some small amount of growth, or someone checked that the rhizome was still alive. Maybe the plant was under a treefall. Zero shoots isn't really a number of shoots in that having no photosynthetic tissue is categorically different. The difference between 2 shoots and 1 shoot is not the same as the difference between 1 shoot and zero shoots. So, it might make sense to exclude these data points for demographic analyses, or to treat them differently in some way.