Data from: Exotic herbivores and fire energy drive standing herbaceous biomass but do not alter compositional patterns in a semiarid savanna ecosystem

The data comprise 2 years of biomass and plant community data from a study on fire and herbivore impacts on vegetation in semi-arid Texas savanna. Data are from 72 10m x 10m plots. We randomly assigned one of three fire treatments (no fire, low-energy fire, and high-energy fire), to each whole plot, resulting in 24 replicates. We then divided each of the seventy-two whole plots into four quadrants and established a subplot in the middle of each quadrant. We randomly assigned one of two herbivory treatments to two subplots within each whole plot, with an herbivore exclusion cage (hereafter exclosure) randomly assigned to two subplots; the remaining two subplots served as controls (herbivore-accessible with no exclosure; hereafter herbivore-accessible). We constructed exclosures from 0.13 x 0.76m 19-gauge steel hardware cloth encircled into a 0.5m diameter cage. We secured them with wires to ensure there were no gaps and securely anchored them to be flush with the soil surface. Similar hardware cloth roofs were constructed and affixed on the top of the exclosures to ensure exclusion of vertebrate herbivores. The herbivore-accessible controls were equivalent diameter subplots without an exclosure.
During the growing season one year after treatment implementation (April 2019) we selected one exclosure and one herbivore-accessible subplot for above-ground biomass harvesting. We removed exclosures and hand-clipped all vegetation in the plot to soil level, separated it by functional group, placed it in paper bags, and dried it at 60 degrees C for 24hrs prior to weighing. We clipped herbivore-accessible subplots in the same manner using a 0.5m diameter circular wire-frame to mimic the caged area in adjacent subplots. This process was repeated in August 2020 on the two remaining unharvested subplots. Before clipping, for each subplot, we visually assessed the percent cover of each species present following the Daubenmire classification system.
Resources in this dataset:

Resource Title: Fire Herbivory Subplot Data
File Name: TexasFireEnergyPlotsDataset.xlsx
Resource Description: All data from the project and a tab for metadata

本数据集包含了为期两年的生物量及植物群落数据，该数据来源于对半干旱德克萨斯沙地植被火灾及食草动物影响的调查研究。数据源自于72个10米×10米的样地。我们对每个整个样地随机分配了三种不同的火烧处理方式（无火烧、低能量火烧和高能量火烧），共得到24个重复样本。随后，我们将这72个整个样地划分为四个象限，并在每个象限的中心设立了一个子样地。在每个整个样地内，我们对两个子样地随机分配了两种食草动物处理方式，其中两个子样地安装了食草动物排除笼（以下简称排除笼）；剩余的两个子样地作为对照（食草动物可及且无排除笼；以下简称食草动物可及）。我们使用0.13米×0.76米的19号钢线网制作排除笼，并将其围成直径0.5米的笼子，用线固定以确保无间隙，并将其牢固地锚定，使其与土壤表面齐平。类似材质的线网屋顶也被构建并固定在排除笼顶部，以确保排除脊椎食草动物。食草动物可及的对照子样地直径相同，但无排除笼。在火烧处理实施后的一年生长季节（2019年4月），我们从排除笼和食草动物可及的子样地中各选取一个进行地上生物量的采集。我们移除了排除笼，并手动将样地内的所有植被剪至土壤水平，按功能群进行分类，放入纸袋中，并在60摄氏度下干燥24小时后称重。使用直径0.5米的圆形金属丝框架以模拟相邻子样地中的笼子区域，以相同的方式剪取食草动物可及的子样地。此过程于2020年8月对剩余的两个未采集子样地重复进行。在剪取之前，根据Daubenmire分类系统，我们对每个子样地中每种物种的覆盖百分比进行了视觉评估。

数据集中包含的资源：
资源标题：火灾食草动物子样地数据
文件名：TexasFireEnergyPlotsDataset.xlsx
资源描述：项目所有数据和元数据表