Resistance and resilience of species composition: Thirty years of experimental mismanagement and subsequent restoration in a species rich meadow

Traditionally managed grasslands are among the most species rich communities, which are threatened by land use changes – management intensification or abandonment. The resistance of their species composition to mismanagement and ability to recover after re-establishment of traditional management is of prime conservational interest. In a manipulative experiment in a wet meadow, we simulated mismanagement by a factorial combination of abandonment of mowing and fertilization. The dominant species Molinia caerulea was removed in half of the plots to assess its role in community dynamics. The 21 years’ mismanagement period was followed by the re-establishment of the traditional management. The plots were sampled yearly from 1994 (the baseline data, before introduction of the experimental treatments), until 2023. Estimates of cover of all vascular plant species provided the species richness and effective number of species. For each year, the chord distances to baseline species composition and..., , , # Title of Dataset: Resistance and resilience of species composition: thirty years of experimental mismanagement and subsequent restoration in a species rich meadow

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The dataset contains five lists.

The first list contains compositional data for individual species across all 24 plots for all the years of the study (1994-2023). It is coded, for example, as r1994p1 which corresponds to the year 1994 and plot id 1. Each column (2-97) contains species covers. Zeroes refer to species missing from communities, so their cover value is a true zero. The values are in relative, i.e. expressed as a percentage. Note that the relative species covers do not sum up to 100% but can exceed it as individual species can overlap in the vertical profile. The data was used for the calculation of plot level species richness and pairwise chord distances. These data also served as an entry for all multivariate analyses providing information about temporal changes in community structure. See details in Met...