Will trees or grasses profit from changing rainfall regimes in savannas?

• Increasing rainfall variability is widely expected under future climate change scenar- ios. How will savanna trees and grasses be affected by growing season dry spells and altered seasonality and how tightly coupled are tree-grass phenologies with rainfall?
• We measured tree and grass responses to growing season dry spells and dry season rainfall. We also tested if the phenologies of 17 deciduous woody species and the Soil Adjusted Vegetation Index of grasses were related to rainfall between 2019 and 2023.
• Tree and grass growth was significantly reduced during growing season dry spells. Tree growth was strongly related to growing season soil water potentials and limited to the wet season. Grasses can rapidly recover after growing season dry spells and grass evapotranspiration was significantly related to soil water potentials in both the wet and dry seasons. Tree leaf flushing commenced before the rainfall onset date with little subsequent leaf flushing. Grasses grew when moisture..., , , # Will trees or grasses profit from changing rainfall regimes in savannas?

These datasets accompany the article published in New Phytologist with the same title.

1\) Tree growth rates (Trees_growth.csv)

2\) Grass evapotranspiration rates (Grass_evapotranspiration.csv)

3\) Historical rainfall data (Skukuza_rainfall.csv)

4\) Daily soil water potentials (Daily_soil_kpa.csv)

Give a brief summary of dataset contents, contextualized in experimental procedures and results.

## Description of the data and file structure

1\) Tree growth rates

Date = date

Species = species

rep = species replicate

diam_increase = increase in stem diameter

rain.year = rainfall year including the 2021 and 2022 rainfall years

2\) Grass evapotranspiration rates

Date = date

lysname = Lysimeter ID

ET0 = daily evapotranspiration

rain.year = rainfall year including the 2021 and 2022 rainfall years (g.m*−*2.day*−*1)

3\) Historical rainfall data (Skukuza_rainfall.csv) has the following columns:

Station ...