Surface soil temperature and water content from warming experiment located at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, Colorado, 2015 to 2019

This data package consists of soil temperature and soil water content sensor data from the warming experiment near the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. Data range is from summer 2015 to summer 2019, when the warming manipulation was terminated. The location of the warming experiment is in the upper montane life zone and consists of meadow vegetation with a mixture of sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata), forb species (Erigeron speciosus, Helianthella quinquenervis, Lathyrus lanszwertii), and graminoid species (Festuca thurberi, Carex spps). Early studies showed that the heating treatment led to earlier snowmelt as well as warmer and drier surface soils, and changes in the functional composition of aboveground biomass favoring sagebrush over forb species (Harte and Shaw, 1995). These changes were mainly observed in the upper, naturally drier zone for the experimental plots. More recent observations of aboveground biomass, soil carbon, and microbial composition require concurrent information about the abiotic environment for interpretation and extrapolation to process-based models. This data package provides the plot- and zone-level abiotic context for the final years of the experiment and consists of csv files with hourly soil temperature (WM_ST.csv) and soil water content (WM_SWC.csv).