Long-term ecological vegetation data for Carrizo National Monument, California

Vegetation dynamics were censused at peak flowering in March to April from 2015 to 2018 at Carrizo National Monument. A total of 4 distinct sites were used to monitor vegetation. The shrub species Ephedra californica was used as the foundation species to structure shrub-open contrasts annuals. A paired shrub-open contrast using 0.5 x 0.5m quadrats were deployed under the shrub canopy and at least 1m at open microsites defined as adjacent sites without canopy cover by a dominant plant species. A total of 1194 independent shrubs were used (and the same number of open microsites), and repeated-measures were avoided by randomly selecting sites at each site each year using transects. For each shrub, the height, longest dimension in width, and perpendicular width was measured, and the volume for a sphere was used to summarize shrub sizes in subsequent analyses. The total abundance of each annual species present was recorded within plots. All analyses to support these data including quality assessment and control were done in R version 3.5.1 and published at Zenodo: Lortie, C.J. 2018. Carrizo long-term ecological data analyses. Zenodo: DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1455808.