Plot-level woody regeneration data from burnt and unburnt Sal (Shorea robusta) forest, Chuchekhola Community Forest, Makwanpur, Nepal

Fire and Sal (Shorea robusta) regeneration, Chuchekhola Community Forest, NepalData supporting: Ghimire P, Prabhakar A, Chand H, Pandit K, Singh B, Joshi R, Pokhrel B."More seedlings, fewer saplings: evidence of a fire-driven regeneration bottleneck in a Sal(Shorea robusta) community forest of central Nepal."StudyWoody regeneration was compared between a burnt area and an adjacent unburnt area of Block 4,Chuchekhola Community Forest, Makwanpur District, Bagmati Province, Nepal (27.555 N, 85.023 E),one year after a wildfire in 2021. Nine plots were sampled systematically at 0.1% intensity,five in the unburnt area and four in the burnt area.Files01_plot_species_matrix.csv (long format, one row per plot-species record)column descriptionplot plot identifier, P1 to P9treatment unburnt or burntlocal_name Nepali common name as recorded in the fieldscientific_name binomialcount number of regenerating individuals (seedlings plus saplings)02_plot_species_matrix_wide.csv — the same data as a plot-by-species matrix, the form usedfor the multivariate analyses.03_derived_phytosociology_and_diversity.csv — values derived from the matrix: per-speciesdensity, relative density, frequency, relative frequency, relative abundance, importance valueindex and abundance-to-frequency ratio for each area; followed by the community-level diversityindices and rarefied richness.Sampling detailSeedlings (30-100 cm height) were counted in a 1.78 m radius subplot (about 10 m2);saplings (>1 m height, DBH <10 cm) and trees (DBH >=10 cm) in a 2.82 m radius subplot(about 25 m2). Densities per hectare in file 03 are scaled on the 25 m2 subplot area.Totals: 79 regenerating individuals in the unburnt area, 99 in the burnt area, 178 overall,representing 18 woody species from 17 genera and 15 families.AnalysisExact two-sided Mann-Whitney U tests with rank-biserial effect sizes; individual-based(Hurlbert) rarefaction; PERMANOVA and ANOSIM on Bray-Curtis dissimilarities with 9999permutations; principal coordinates analysis. Performed in Python 3.10 with NumPy and SciPy.LicenceCreative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).ContactAman Prabhakar, [e-mail]