Plasticity and adaptation of northern California eelgrass in response to sediment conditions

Considerable research describes the interactions between seagrasses and their sedimentary environment, but there is little information on how populations differ in their innate versus plastic responses to these differences. Here, we test whether sediment contributes to eelgrass population differentiation and the nature of plastic responses to different sediment environments. We do this via a 15-week, fully crossed common garden experiment with two populations and their native sediment types. Plants from the warmer-temperature, clay-dominated site (90% silt + clay, 10% sand) consistently maintained greater biomass than plants from the cooler, sand-dominated site (60% sand, 40% silt + clay). Plants from both populations were highly plastic for root length and clonal shoot size, with both increasing when planted in clay-dominated compared to sand-dominated sediment. Plants from the clay-dominated site grew longer rhizomes in foreign sediment while plants from the sand-dominated site had no..., For methods on collecting, generating, and processing the data, please see [DOI: 10.1007/s12237-025-01549-6], , # Plasticity and adaptation of northern California eelgrass in response to sediment conditions

## Description of the data and file structure

This README was written on 9/17/24 by Karolina Zabinski.

We explored the effects of sediment and population origin on eelgrass performance and the root microbiome. 

### Files and variables

#### File: GSEData.csv

**Description:** 

##### Variables

* SampleID:  Unique sample ID for each plant, first number corresponds to treatment code (1-Millerton Point soil, Millerton Point plant; 2- Blake's Landing soil, Blake's Landing plant; 3- Blake's Landing soil, Millerton Point plant; 4- Millerton Point soil, Blake's Landing plant), second number corresponds to which tank the plant was in (1-15). 
* PlantOrigin: population eelgrass originated from
* SedOrigin: location sediment originated from
* TankID: tank eelgrass was grown in for duration of experiemnt
* Dead: Whether the plant was dead (1) or alive (0) at the end of the experiment
* ShootLength_m...,