Direct and higher-order interactions in plant communities under increasing weather persistence

Climate change is increasing the weather persistence in the mid-latitudes, prolonging both dry and wet spells compared to historic averages. These newly emerging environmental conditions destabilize plant communities, but the role of species interactions in this process is unknown. Here, we tested how direct and higher-order interactions (HOIs) between species may change in synthesized grassland communities along an experimental gradient of increasing persistence in precipitation regimes. Our results indicate that species interactions (including HOIs) are an important determinant of plant performance under increasing weather persistence. Out of the 12 most parsimonious models predicting species productivity, 75 % contained significant direct interactions and 92 % significant HOIs. Inclusion of direct interactions or HOIs respectively tripled or quadrupled the explained variance of target species biomass compared to null models only including the precipitation treatment. Drought was the ..., , , # Direct and higher-order interactions in plant communities under increasing weather persistence

This dataset includes aboveground dried biomass data per species (3 individuals per mesocosms pooled together) of all treatments utilized in the experiment. All biomass above 4.5 cm was harvested at the end of the experiment between 28/10/2019 - 8/11/2019, oven dried at 70 °C for > 72 h and then immediately weighed to the closest 0.01 g. For further information regarding the utilized methodology, please refer to the methods section in the published article: 10.1111/oik.10128.

## Description of the data and file structure

The file uploaded is in .xlsx format with two tabs, the first including metadata, and the second the actual dataset in LONG format. The different column headers include:

| Column header | Description ...