Johnson et al. (2025) Vegetation Data

Plant community composition data from the Central Grasslands Research Extension Center. Briefly, data were collected in 2022 from 12 different pastures, managed with 3 different management practices. 4 pastures were managed with season-long continuous grazing, 4 with patch-burn grazing where a quarter of each pasture was burned each spring, and 4 were managed with a modified twice-over rest-rotational grazing that sought to create landscape level heterogenetiy by altering the grazing intensity within individual paddocks. See "Heterogeneity-based Management Restores Diversity and Alters Vegetation Structure without Decreasing Invasive Grasses in Working Mixed-Grass Prairie" by Duquette et al. (2022) for full description of management practices. Presecribed fires were not conducted the year these data were collected due to a lack of fuel accumulation following a drought the year prior. Each pasture was divided into eight 8-ha sub-patches. Within each sub-patch one 60m permanent transect was established, and sampled every other meter using a 1 m^2 quadrat. Within a quadrat, all plants were identified to species-level. If a plant could not be identified to species level, it was placed in a morphospecies with other similar species. Species abundances were assessed using modified Daubenmire cover classes, converted to midpoints, and then relativized. Litter Depth, cover, and thatch depth were also recorded at each sample point (see "Fire and Grazing Reduce Invasive Grass Thatch in Rangelands" by Kjaer et al. (2024). Data were collected by a team of technicians and graduate students who were all trained in plant identification and cover estimates prior to data collection, cover estimates were standardized between observers prior to each bout of data collection.