Infauna shift trait-productivity relationships in submerged aquatic vegetation communities

This data and code (RStudio) are associated with the peer-reviewed research article, titled 'Root puppet masters: Infauna shift trait-productivity relationships in submerged aquatic vegetation communities'. The data is a product of a 15-week in situ transplant experiment in the northern Baltic Sea. It involved experimental submerged aquatic plant communities with, and without, experimental additions of Macoma balthica, a sedentary bivalve. Experimental plant communities were tricultures with varying species composition, compiled from a pool of 6 different species, to create an experimental gradient of trait community weighted means (CWMs) that allowed us to detect changes more clearly in plant trait-biomass production relationships in response to the M. balthica treatment. The plant species used in the experiment were Zostera marina, Potamogeton perfoliatus, Zannichellia major, Ruppia cirrhosa, Stuckenia pectinata and Myriophyllum spicatum., For a full description of data collection and processing, please see the Methods section in the article, 'Root puppet masters: Infauna shift trait-productivity relationships in submerged aquatic vegetation communities'. The text file is an accessible format of RStudio script, which explicitly shows how data was handled., , # Infauna shift trait-productivity relationships in submerged aquatic vegetation communities

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.6t1g1jx7g](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.6t1g1jx7g)

## Description of the data and file structure

Data was collected during a 15-week transplant experiment conducted *in situ* in the northern Baltic Sea. Artificial triculture communities of submerged aquatic vegetation species were constructed (30 x 30 cm), using mixtures of 6 different plant species. Their species assemblage was designed to create a gradient in measureable plant functional trait values. The artificial plant communities were replicated, so that every artifical plant community came in pairs. One of the pairs was treated with an experimental addition of ten adult *Macoma balthica* additions and the other served as a control treatment. The *M. balthica* treatment was administered using a mark-recapture approach. At the end of the experiment, the experimental communities were harvested and measured ...