Remote sensing reveals that wild herbivores limit senescent vegetation accumulation on dryland conservation reserves

Wild herbivores threaten vegetation recovery on dryland conservation reserves globally. Monitoring herbivore impacts in remote drylands is difficult because vegetation biomass transitions between living and senescent states in response to irregular precipitation events. However, land managers need a detailed understanding of the impacts that wild herbivores have on vegetation to develop and refine herbivore management strategies. Remote sensing provides the ability to assess grazing impacts on living and senescent vegetation with high temporal and spatial resolution. Here, we use Sentinel-2 satellite imagery to investigate how grazing by kangaroos and rabbits impacted the fractional cover of photosynthetic (PV) and non-photosynthetic (NPV) vegetation over 7 years on three dryland reserves with experimental herbivore exclusion plots. We compared PV and NPV cover in plots that were accessible to all herbivores, accessible to kangaroos only, and inaccessible to both rabbits and kangaroos. ..., , , # Data from: Remote sensing reveals that wild herbivores limit senescent vegetation accumulation on dryland conservation reserves

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.j0zpc86rb](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.j0zpc86rb)

## Description of the data and file structure

### Files and variables

#### File: DataFrom_WildHerbivoreGrazing.csv

**Description:** This data set contains all data used in the analysis for \"Remote sensing reveals that wild herbivores limit senescent vegetation accumulation on dryland conservation reserves\"**. **Fractional vegetation cover measurements were derived from Sentinel-2 reflectance data. Pre-processed fractional vegetation cover images for Mungo and Boolcoomatta were obtained from the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network here: [TERN - Data.](https://data.tern.org.au/gov/qld/surface_reflectance/sentinel2/nsw/)\
Pre-proceesed Measurements for the Ikara-Flinders Ranges are not publicly available. We obtained these measurements by downloading raw Sentinel-2 ..., ,