Back into the past: Resurveying random plots to track community changes in Italian coastal dunes

This dataset includes two excel sheets. The first contains
vegetation data ("species_data", a matrix of 668 plots x 213
species) and the second contains plant functional traits data
("traits_data") that were used to evaluate temporal changes in
taxonomic and functional diversity of Mediterranean coastal dune habitats.
As to the first sheet ("species_data"): vegetation data were
collected at two points in time (Time 0, hereafter T0:
2002-2007, and Time 1, herafter T1: 2017-2018) in 334
randomly-sampled, georeferenced, standardized (4 m2) plots. Historical
data used for the resurveying study were extracted from RanVegDunes
(Sperandii et al. 2017). Details on the resurveying protocol can be found
in Sperandii et al. (2019), but in short: resampling activities
took place during the same months in which the original sampling
was done, and plot positions were relocated using a GPS unit on
which historical geographic coordinates were stored. Plots are
located in coastal dune sites along the Tyrrhenian and Adriatic
coasts of Central Italy, and belong to herbaceous communities classified
into the following EU Habitats (sensu Annex I 92/43/EEC): upper
beach (Habitat 1210), embryo dunes (Habitat 2110), shifting dunes (Habitat
2120), fixed dunes (Habitat 2210), and dune grasslands (Habitat
2230). A subset of plots could not be classified into an EU
Habitat because they were highly disturbed or invaded by alien species
(“NC-plots”). The matrix includes cover data, expressed as percentage (%)
cover.  As to the second sheet ("traits_data"):
this sheet includes data on 3 plant functional traits, two of
them quantitative (plant height, specific leaf area - SLA) and
one qualitative (plant lifespan). Data for the quantitative
traits represent species-level average trait values and
were extracted from “TraitDunes”, a database registered on the
global platform TRY (Kattge et al., 2020). Functional trait data were
collected in the same sites covered by the resurveying study. Functional
trait data were originally measured on the most abundant species, and are
available for a varying number of species depending on the trait.
References: Kattge, J., Bönisch, G., Díaz, S., Lavorel, S., Prentice, I.
C., Leadley, P., ... & Wirth, C. (2020). TRY plant trait
database–enhanced coverage and open access. Global Change
Biology. Sperandii, M.G., Prisco, I., Stanisci, A., & Acosta,
A.T.R (2017). RanVegDunes-A random plot database of Italian
coastal dunes. Phytocoenologia, 47(2), 231-232.
Sperandii, M.G., Bazzichetto, M., Gatti, F., & Acosta, A.T.R.
(2019). Back into the past: Resurveying random plots to track
community changes in Italian coastal dunes. Ecological
Indicators, 96, 572-578.