Differential responses of community-level functional traits to mid- and late-season experimental drought in a temperate grassland

Extreme precipitation events are becoming more intense and frequent due to climate change. This climatic shift is impacting the structure and dynamics of natural communities and the key ecosystem services they provide. Changes in species abundance under these conditions are thought to be mediated by functional traits, morpho-physiological characteristics of an organism that impact its fitness. Future environmental conditions may, therefore, favour different traits to those in present-day communities. After six years of manipulated precipitation levels, including drought (−50% of ambient precipitation), irrigation (+50% of ambient precipitation), and control (ambient precipitation), we measured five key functional traits (plant height, leaf dry matter content [LDMC], leaf thickness, specific leaf area [SLA], and leaf phosphorus concentration) in 586 individual vascular plants to study the effects of precipitation changes on community weighted functional traits. Additionally, we tested wh..., Study site
The experiment was conducted at the Upper Seeds field site (51°46'16.8\"N 1°19'59.1\"W, 155 m a.s.l) in Wytham woods, Oxfordshire, UK. The study site is a calcareous temperate grassland characterised by a shallow soil depth (300-500 mm depth) alkaline soils (Gibson & Brown, 1991), a daily average temperature ranging between -5 °C and 26 °C, a mean annual temperature of 11.5 ºC (2016-2021), daily total precipitation of 0-40 mm (2016-2021) and an annual total precipitation of 686 mm (2016-2021) (Table S1). According to the Köppen-Geiger climate classification, the study site constitutes a maritime temperate climate (Cfb) (Peel et al., 2007). The site is currently managed for maintenance by mowing twice per year, a common practice across most European grasslands (Török et al., 2018). The first mowing takes place mid-growing season (late July), and the second at the end of the growing season (late September).
To test our hypotheses, we experimentally manipulated precipitation l..., , # Data from: Differential responses of community-level functional traits to mid- and late-season experimental drought in a temperate grassland

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.kh18932gb](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.kh18932gb)

The dataset contains the data and scripts to reproduce the analysis performed in Fenollosa et al 2024 JEcol, which mainly consists in contrasting grassland community composition between plots subjected to three precipitation treatments in a block design, calculating specific and fixed community-weighted means for five functional traits, calculating intraspecific variability, using the functional trait data to build a PCA and calculate functional diversity. Full information of the experimental design and the data can be found in the manuscript.

## Description of the data, file structure, and code

The file contains a folder with the data used and a folder with the scripts, together with a text file named \"Metadata.txt\" that reviews the content and purpose of each...