Soil as a critical component of vegetation restoration on a sub-alpine mountain summit in Acadia National Park

Aims
Recreational use on mountain summits has caused severe degradation of soils and vegetation, and climate change is exacerbating these impacts. Best practices for restoration of these important ecosystems are unknown. Here we examine the effectiveness of different treatments for restoring native vegetation (plant cover and native species richness) in degraded areas on a mountain summit through an experimental restoration approach.
Location
Cadillac Mountain, Acadia National Park, Maine, USA.
Methods
We tested six restoration-method treatments: control, planting modules, coir erosion control, seed and coir, soil and coir, and soil, seed, and coir. We established four replicates of each restoration-method treatment in 2016 and monitored percent cover and species richness twice per year from 2017-2022. In 2017, we established four more plots for each of three soil-depth treatments (2.5 cm soil, seed, and coir, 13 cm soil and coir, and 13 cm soil, seed, and coir), and monitored percent c..., , # Soil as a critical component of vegetation restoration on a sub-alpine mountain summit in Acadia National Park

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.51c59zwm2](10.5061/dryad.51c59zwm2)

## Description of the data and file structure

Data and R scripts for analysis of experimental vegetation restoration plots on Cadillac Mountain, Acadia National Park, Maine, USA. Data collected from 2017-2022.

### Files and variables

#### File: cadillacdata\_manuscript\_final.csv

**Description:** The field collected data from our restoration experiments on the summit of Cadillac Mountain from 2017-2022.

##### Variables

* group.code: Species or higher order taxonomic code
* month: Month of data collection. All data collection occurred in July, August, and September
* year: Year of data collection represented by last two digits of the full year (i.e., 2020 = \"20\")
* ridge: Which ridge (north or east) the plot was located at
* site: Number assigned to each site. For this study the sites were 1, 2, 7, and 8
*...,