Temporal invasion regime attributes influence community synchrony and stability in an arid land system

Invasive species have become a major threat to ecosystems across the globe, causing significant ecological and economic damage. To anticipate how communities may respond to future invasions, it is crucial to refine how invader impacts are evaluated, especially in historically uninvaded and highly variable systems such as arid lands. While invader abundance is typically used to predict invader impacts, it may not effectively capture the dynamics that occur over time for established invaders that experience cyclical dynamics (i.e., boom-bust patterns), making it more challenging to track invader impacts. To address this issue, we leveraged a long-term vegetation dataset to develop a novel invasion regime framework for a dominant annual invader in North American deserts, Brassica tournefortii. Using abundance data over time, we evaluated how attributes of this invader’s boom-bust dynamics (i.e., invasion level, boom frequency and magnitude) influence the long-term synchrony and stability o..., Study Design & Sampling – we leveraged long-term observational transects that were established in 2002 as part of the Coachella Valley Multiple Species Habitat Conservation Plan Monitoring Program (Allen et al. 2005). Nineteen belt transects were arranged as 100 m x 10 m (0.1ha) rectangles (Figure 2A). Within each belt transect, four 1 m2 quadrats plots are spatially grouped within a cluster, with clusters spaced 44 meters apart (3 clusters per transect: A,B,C; n=12 plots, Figure 2B). Plots were alternated along the center line of the transect for a total of 228 plots. Due to some plots missing vegetation data, we reduced our dataset to 226 plots. Vegetation within these plots was surveyed annually from 2003-2019 using visual estimates of cover for each species present within the aboveground vegetation during peak biomass in the spring, (March-April, dependent on phenology).
To assess traditional metrics of community-level responses to invasion, we created linear-mixed effect models..., , # DATA FROM: Temporal Invasion Regime Attributes Influence Community Synchrony and Stability in an Arid Land System

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.rjdfn2zm0](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.rjdfn2zm0)

## Files in this repository

*Files* contain data collected on plant cover from 2003-2019 as a part of the Coachella Valley Multiple Species Habitat Conservation Plan Monitoring Program.

**DATA FILES:**

**fulldatasetCCB.csv**: this file contains all plant cover data collected for each of the 228 plots from 2003-2019. First 7 columns define the plot information, and the remainder of the columns provide % cover data within the quadrat. Each column containing cover is titled in the order as follows Genus_species for plants, or Percent_soiltype for soil conditions (soil not used in this analysis)

Yr_TRANSECT - year and transect identifier together

YEAR - year sampling occurred

plot_year - plot identifier with year sampled

transect- identifier for belt transect (19 transects total). The l...