Data for: Spatial variability in the contribution of termites to the decay of plant detritus

Drylands are characterized by high spatial variability in resource availability due to sporadic rainfall, topography of the landscape and important effects of animals. Resource availability gradients may trigger patterns in decomposer population abundances and activity which could affect ecosystem functions such as decomposition. Here, we examined the influence of resource availability gradients on the importance of termites in the decomposition of wood and grass litter. We placed wood blocks and grass litter baits in bags accessible and inaccessible to termites across wood and grass resource gradients as determined by the presence or absence of a top mammalian predator and across topographic gradients during a 9-month period in arid Australia. We hypothesized that grass-eating termite activity would track grass abundance and wood-eating termite activity would track wood abundance. Termites were the predominant decomposition agent at these sites. Termites contributed to 99.5% of wood de..., The precise method for how the data was collected can be found in the article presenting the data. , , Description of columns for each dataset found in this Dryad repository. The code necessary to run the anlyses and plot the graphs can be found in the file \"clean_script_publish.Rmd\".

The different datasets descrobe decomposition rates of wood and grass litter over a 9 month period in an Australian arid ecossystem in addition to termite abundances and vegetation surveys.

Dataset: decompt_woodgrass_weight.csv
Columns:

* tag: individual ID of litter bag
* substrate: type of litter (wood or grass)
* transect: dune or swale ID sampled
* state: side of the fence (NSW = dingo absent, SA = dingo present)
* set: station number
* habitat: topographic position
* treatment: type of litter bag (exclude = inaccessible to termtes, open = accessible to termites)
* termites: discovred by termites or not (Y = yes, N = no)
* ternum: numerical termite discovery (1 = discovered by termites, 2 = not discovered by termites)
* initwweight: initial wet weight of litter in grams
* initdweight: initial dry wei...