Data for: Prescribed versus wildfire impacts on exotic plants and soil microbes in California grasslands

Prescribed burns are often used as a management tool to decrease exotic plant cover and increase native plant cover in grasslands. These changes may also be mediated by fire impacts on soil microbial communities, which drive plant productivity and function. Yet, the ecological effects of prescribed burns compared to wildfires on either plant or soil microbial composition remain unclear.
Grassland fires account for roughly 80% of global annual fires, but only roughly 12% of research on belowground impacts of fires occurs in grasslands, limiting our understanding of aboveground belowground connections in these important habitats.
Here, we took advantage of the serendipitous opportunity of a wildfire burning through the same reserve where we had previously sampled a prescribed burn. This enabled us to investigate the impacts of a spring prescribed burn versus a fall wildfire on plant cover and community composition and bacterial and fungal richness, abundance, and composition. Our Californ..., , APSoil_file column header metadata.txt
This is a central file that has column header descriptions for the Dryad data files.
APSoil_SpringPlantdata.csv
Plant species composition data for grassland plots in prescribed and wildfire study sites. It includes plots that were exposed to fire (i.e. burned) and those not (i.e. unburned). Data were collected in the first spring after the respective fire. Six letter species codes are used for column headers.  Full species names for species codes can be found in APSoil_Plant Species List.csv Columns for species diversity response variables are also included in that are stratified across the entire community or based on species provenance (i.e. native or exotic).
APSoil_Plant Species List.csv
Provides full species names for any plant species observed during the study. A \"NA\" value was given for any species that had no field observation notes.
APSoil_Bacterial-Metadata-withsoilPCA_final.csv
Bacterial richness, diversity and abundance response variabl...