Native herbivore browsing alters plant physical and chemical traits in a eucalypt forest understory

Macropods exhibit selective herbivory on plant traits within and between species and hence can alter plant trait variation. In this study we asked, what are the effects of macropod herbivory on intraspecific variation in plant traits of forest understorey species? We tested the effects of herbivory by macropods on eight plant traits, in nine understorey species using a herbivore exclusion experiment. Generalised linear mixed models were used to test for differences between herbivory treatments in trait means as well as variation within species and at the community level. Macropod herbivory resulted in differences in either the mean trait value or trait variance within a species for seven of the eight tested plant traits. Macropod exclusion resulted in larger dimensions of size for most species, as well as changes in specific leaf area, moisture content, and carbon content of leaves. Further, community-weighted means of specific leaf area, moisture content, and leaf nitrogen were lower i..., Please review the attached README document and the accompanying publication under the same title as the dataset., Requires microsoft excel., # Native herbivore browsing alters plant physical and chemical traits in a eucalypt forest understory

Dataset contains six excel files containing raw data used for calculations of trait values for nine species in an open eucalypt understorey under two herbivory treatments. Data is also used to calculate community weighted means of those traits.

All data required to generate manuscript tables and figures as well as those in supplementary documents are included and detailed below.

Size: 83kb
Format: .csv (5 files)

## Description of the data and file structure

Each csv file is described below along with a description of any column headers.

**NutrientTraitData** --> contains raw carbon and nitrogen nutrient data for all species at each site.
Dimensions: 96 rows x 4 columns
Column headings:
Species = the species for which the data was measured.
Treatment = which treatment the species was under, open (accessible to Macropods) or exclosure (fenced off to Macropods).
C (%) = carbon as ...