‘Social distancing’ between plants may amplify coastal restoration at early stage

This dataset contains data and codes from three field experiments described in the paper: “Hao Huang, Chi Xu and Quan-Xing Liu. (2021) ‘Social distancing’ between plants may amplify coastal restoration at early stage, Journal of Applied Ecology, DOI: 10.1111/1365-2664.14044”. 

The experiment investigates the effects of a factorial combination of three factors: above-ground spatial configurea and below-ground connectivity with low- and high-elevation environmental stress. We test the two species (Scirpus and Spartina) on performance such as colonization, growth rate, as well as survival rate at one growth season.   

Abstract for published article:

\"Ecological restoration is crucial to counteract the degradation of coastal ecosystems. Recent studies increasingly suggest that coastal restoration success can be amplified by harnessing positive interactions between individuals of foundation species, with clumped spatial designs as an easy-to-implement approach. However, positive in...