Serpentine plant community surveys (3 years) following a dispersal manipulation at McLaughlin Natural Reserve

While investigating how historical contingencies manifest in ecological communities is common, research has yet to uncover how species distributions and abundances may be impacted by ecological processes interacting across spatial and temporal scales. We assessed the influence of a historical dispersal event on community assembly by simulating five scales of dispersal for 240 serpentine annual plant communities that experienced a large shift from drought to high rainfall conditions over three years. We collected, aggregated, and redistributed the aboveground seed bank from 30 sites across five nested spatial scales (~1 m, 5 m, 100 m, 5 km, and 10 km), and annually censused communities over a three-year period to identify change in community structure among dispersal scales and over time. We assessed the change in community composition and diversity that occurred over the study period by comparing contrasts of Bray-Curtis disimilarity and net changes in species richness between a baselin..., , , # Serpentine plant community surveys (3 years) following a dispersal experiment at McLaughlin Natural Reserve

We have submitted the raw (data_raw.zip) and clean (data_clean.zip) data files and R scripts (Rmarkdown files) needed to perform the analyses described in our article: 'Experimentally enhancing dispersal reveals the outsized importance of transient dynamics in a fluctuating environment'. The article investigates the assembly trajectories of communities following a dispersal manipulation under the background of a changing climate (from drought to non-drought).

## Data collection

In the summer of 2013, 30 serpentine grassland sites were chosen from the northwestern and southeastern ends of McLaughlin Natural Reserve in northern California. Each site was then divided into eight 0.75 m x 0.75 m plots that were separated by 1 m of bare ground and arranged in a 2 x 4 block, for a total of 240 plots (8 plots x 30 sites). Sites were chosen such that they could be hierarchically group...,