Biomass and nutritional qualities of six regenerating hardwood species in the Allegheny hardwood forest type

Herbivores alter plant quantity and quality through direct tissue consumption and indirectly via the structural and chemical allocational strategies plants deploy in response to herbivory. This data publication provides tabular data containing experimental evidence of how white-tailed deer browsing alters their forage resource and, ultimately, their nutritional carrying capacity. Using a large-scale experiment that manipulated deer access (fenced versus unfenced plots), we tested whether browsing altered the nutritional quality and biomass of six regenerating hardwood species (red maple, American beech, birch species, pin cherry, and black cherry), as well as the nutritional carrying capacity using summer (June-August) 2017 data from sixteen sites in early-successional hardwood forests of Pennsylvania, USA. Data include browsable biomass and estimated nutritional carrying capacity (i.e., deer days per hectare) for each site, averaged across these six dominant species as well as for just pin cherry. Also included is browsable biomass for both stem and leaf tissue as well as average nutritional quality data (neutral detergent fiber, dry matter digestibility, and digestible protein) for each of these six dominant species at each site.
These data are part of a larger set of sites designed to test how deer browsing affects plant community dynamics and how that impact is modulated by landscape context (Royo et al. 2017). For this study, we focused on 16 sites spanning a wide edaphic gradient to examine how browsing altered the quantity and quality of their forage resource.
For more information about this study and these data, see Glover et al. (in review).