Data for: Cessation of grazing causes biodiversity loss and homogenization of soil food webs

There is widespread concern that cessation of grazing in historically grazed ecosystems is causing biotic homogenization and biodiversity loss. We used 12 montane grassland sites along an 800-km north-south gradient across the United Kingdom, to test whether cessation of grazing affects local ɑ- and β-diversity of belowground food webs. We show cessation of grazing leads to strongly decreased ɑ-diversity of most groups of soil microbes and fauna, particularly of relatively rare taxa. In contrast, the β-diversity varied between groups of soil organisms. While most soil microbial communities exhibited increased homogenization after cessation of grazing, we observed decreased homogenization for soil fauna after cessation of grazing. Overall, our results indicate that exclusion of domesticated herbivores from historically grazed montane grasslands has far-ranging negative consequences for diversity of belowground food webs. This underscores the importance of grazers for maintaining the dive..., Study sites. We selected 12 montane grassland sites across an 800 km north-south gradient of the United Kingdom (Figure 1). Sites were selected based on the following criteria: 1) grasslands had never received inorganic fertilisers or herbicides; 2) grazer exclusion plots had to be present for at least 10 years; 3) sites needed to be sufficiently far apart (>10 km) to be considered independent from each other; 4) the main form of historical management at the site is extensive grazing by sheep. Sites were typically grazed by purebred sheep at stocking densities of 1–2 ewes per hectare per year, although historical variation in grazing pressure across sites has resulted in mosaics of vegetation with patches of short and tall grass, interspersed with patches of dwarf-shrubs dominated by Calluna vulgaris, Vaccinium myrtillus, Erica tetralix and Erica cinerea. All sites were visited and sampled once, between 28th of April and 7th June 2015. Fenced grazing exclosures varied in size from 25..., , # Data for: Cessation of grazing causes biodiversity loss and homogenization of soil food webs

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.7h44j0zxr](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.7h44j0zxr)

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The 7 Excel files in this DRYAD repository constitute an addition to the data supplied in the supplemental material of this paper. Please note that most files consist of more than 1 sheet. Below we have described the content of these sheets Corresponding names of the sheets are denoted between brackets below (e.g. (\"summary of values\").

The file entitled \"All\_diversity\_and\_abiotic\_data.xlsx\" contains the total numbers for each of the measured plots for all the variables of interest for which the methods are described in the method section of the paper.

* All column names of the overview sheet (\"ALL\_DATA\") are explained in a second sheet, sheet 2, entitled \"Metadata\". Info on the column names can be found in column B of the sheet \"Metadata\".

The file entitled \"ANALYSIS\_veg\_species\_&...