Plant community composition, abundance, phenology, and soil data from a four-year seasonal drought experiment followed by four years of recovery in a mixed grassland on the Colorado Plateau

These data were compiled for a study that investigated the effects of experimentally imposed seasonal droughts (cool season drought, warm season drought, ambient) and drought recovery on plant community dynamics in a mixed dryland ecosystem. In 2015, U.S. Geological Survey ecologists began recording vegetation and soil moisture data in 36 experimental plots which manipulated precipitation in two plant community types. The experiment consisted of three precipitation treatments: control (ambient precipitation), cool-season drought (-66% ambient precipitation November-April), and warm-season drought (-66% ambient precipitation May-October), applied in two plant communities (perennial grasses with or without a large shrub, Mormon tea, Ephedra viridis) over a three-year period. These data were collected from 2015 to 2024 near Canyonlands National Park, UT. These data represent biogeochemical concentrations (carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus), estimates of individual Mormon tea plants, plant and interspace ocular cover estimates, experimental plot, soil moisture (soil volumetric water content), grass mortality, phenology, observed plant species, species abundance, estimates of plant species biomass, species composition and ground cover data from experimental treatments. The datasets includes data on when treatments were imposed, ambient precipitation, soil moisture measured at two depths, plant cover and plant biomass measured in the spring and fall from 2015-2019. Additionally, soil cores were collected in the fall 2018 and spring 2019 to measure biogeochemical cycling concentrations for available carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and microbial biomass. Standing grass biomass and Mormon tea biomass are done through allometric relationships based on a combination of point-frame green hits, leaf lengths, and leaf numbers, combined with double sampling. The biomass data provide an estimate of how treatments are impacting overall grass and shrub species productivity. These data can be used to compare the effects of drought seasonality on shrub and grass communities and biogeochemistry dynamics.