Roadside disturbance promotes plant communities with arbuscular mycorrhizal associations in mountain regions worldwide

Aim: We aimed to assess the impact of road disturbances on the dominant mycorrhizal types in ecosystems at the global level and how this mechanism can potentially lead to lasting plant community changes.
Location: Globally distributed mountain regions
Time Period: 2007-2018 Taxa studied: Plants (linked to their associated mycorrhizal fungi)
Methods: We used a database of coordinated plant community surveys following mountain roads from 894 plots in 11 mountain regions across the globe in combination with an existing database of mycorrhizal-plant associations in order to approximate the relative abundance of mycorrhizal types in natural and disturbed environments.
Results: Our findings show that roadside disturbance promotes the cover of plants associated with arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi. This effect is especially strong in colder mountain environments and in mountain regions where plant communities are dominated by ectomycorrhizal (EcM) or ericoid-mycorrhizal (ErM) associations. F..., Combination of the long-term vegetation monitoring dataset from MIREN (www.mountaininvasions.org) with a database of mycorrhizal associations (FungalRoots). For more details, see the paper., , # Roadside disturbance promotes plant communities with arbuscular mycorrhizal associations in mountain regions worldwide

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.0p2ngf27s](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.0p2ngf27s)

This dataset contains the relevant subsets of the MIREN database and the associated extractions from the FungalRoot-database, as used in the underlying analysis.

## Description of the data and file structure

Included datasets:

1. Miren species data_DRYAD.xlsx: Species observations per plots across all of the MIREN regions, containing the following columns:
1. name.region - Species name, followed by region code, to uniquely identify the species per region.
2. Site - Site code, consisting of the region (e.g., AUN), road (e.g., AK), transect (e.g., 01) and plot (e.g., 1). For details on the study design, see the paper.
3. Cover - cover class (1 to 7, 1 = <1%; 2 = 1 to 5%; 3 = 5 to 25%; 4 = 25 to 50%; 5 = 50 to 75%; 6 = 75 to 95%; and 7 = 95–100%). If NA, no cover wa...