Interannual variation in climate contributes to contingency in post-fire restoration outcomes in seeded sagebrush steppe

Interannual variation, especially weather, is an often-cited reason for restoration “failures”; yet its importance is difficult to experimentally isolate across broad spatiotemporal extents, due to correlations between weather and site characteristics. In the analysis associated with this dataset, we examined post-fire treatments within sagebrush-steppe ecosystems to ask: 1) Is weather following seeding efforts a primary reason why restoration outcomes depart from predictions? and 2) Does the management-relevance of weather differ across space and with time since treatment? This dataset integrates remotely sensed estimates of sagebrush (Artemisia spp.) cover from the RCMAP product (https://www.mrlc.gov/data-services-page), areas that received post-fire seeding, identified using the Land Treatment Digital Library (https://ltdl.wr.usgs.gov/), and GridMet surface meteorological data (https://www.climatologylab.org/gridmet.html) to describe the impacts of weather on sagebrush recovery foll...