Orchard floor plant communities: Multispecies cover crops in commercial almond orchards

Cover crops are an important tool for adding biodiversity to agricultural systems that are increasingly pressured by climate change and continued intensfication. In California, orchard cropping systems are widespread and uniquely impacted by drought and uncertain economic conditions. While the cash crop is growing in trees, there are significant amounts of land on the orchard floor beneath the trees that could be used to support orchard sustainability goals. Cover crops could be planted on the orchard floor with specific goals such as increasing soil health, increasing soil water holding capacity, providing floral resources for pollinators, or many other factors. Understanding how planted cover crops interact with resident vegetation on the orchard floor is essential for cover crop planning and vegetation management. The data here were collected in a two-year, three-site experiment in commercial almond orchards in the Central Valley of California. Two different five-species cover crop m..., , The README file has more information about experimental methods and information contained in each column of the dataset.
The two data files contain the same data, but using treatment names in the \"Treatment\" column that match treatment descriptions in the associated manuscript. This was updated on 2021-10-26, which matches the filename for the dataset with updated treatment names., # Orchard floor plant communities: Multispecies cover crops in commercial almond orchards

Data collected by Steven Haring, UC Davis
Design and oversight by Amélie Gaudin and Brad Hanson

## Description of the data and file structure

**EXPERIMENT DESCRIPTION:** The data in this dataset come from plant community surveys undertaken within a cover cropping experiment that took place in commercial almond orchards in Central California, USA from 2018 to 2020. The experiment was set up at three locations, one each in Tehama, Merced, and Kern Counties in California. Each location had four repetitions of the experiment at each year, and the experiment was repeated at each location (i.e. six site-years total, with two years at each of three locations). Each site had two cover crop treatments (i.e. pollinator, soil) and one bare ground treatment. The Kern and Merced sites also had a more intensive (i.e. all vegetation controlled) treatment.

NONE in the species column is associated with bare g...