Data from: Legacy effects of flooding duration on growth and reproductive traits of Carex cinerascens Kük. in the Poyang Lake wetland

Alteration of flooding regimes due to global change may have cascading
effects on plant community composition and associated ecosystem services.
Here, we experimentally investigated the effects of six flooding regimes
with contrasting combinations of flooding duration (5.5, 6, and 6.5
months) and submergence rate (from 3.3 to 17.5 cm/day) on the growth and
reproductive traits of Carex cinerascens, a dominant plant species of the
Poyang Lake wetland in southern China. The time span of this study
included a summer flooding event and the following growing seasons (autumn
of first year and spring of following year) before the return of the next
flooding event. The six flooding treatments affected plant traits during
the flooding and the following growing seasons, but the different
submergence rates under the same flooding duration did generally not show
significant influence on plant traits. The 6.5-month flooding treatments
had many fewer old (0.4 on average) and new stems (1 on average) than the
5.5-month treatments (8.3 and 29 stems, respectively) at the end of the
flooding. The treatments with 5.5 months of flooding had 23% more stems
than the other treatments and 26% more community biomass than the 6-month
flooding treatments during the autumn growing season. The effects of
summer flooding persisted in spring of the following year, but with an
opposite trend of C. cinerascens growth traits response to flooding
treatments compared to autumn. In addition, the 6-month flooding
treatments induced a higher number of inflorescences (39) than the
5.5-month (22) and 6.5-month floods (3). Altogether, our findings
highlighted the important legacy effects of summer flooding with some
trade-offs between growth recovery (autumn) and resilience (following
spring) and between resource allocation to biomass production in autumn
and resource allocation to sexual reproduction in the following spring,
that were both mediated by flooding duration.