Schynige Platte Alpine Botanical Garden land-use experiment

This dataset was used for the publication "Boch, Blaser, Föhr, Küchler, Fischer (2024) Haymaking complemented by moderate disturbances can sustain and restore species-rich alpine to subalpine grasslands" in Alpine Botany. It contains vegetation records (species lists, percentage cover of species) of six grassland sites with each five 2x2 m treatment plots established in the Schynige Platte Alpine Botanical Garden. In a six-year experiment, we tested the response of plant species richness and mean ecological indicator values that we calculated from this dataset, to management treatments ranging from combined haymaking and scraping, to haymaking or scraping alone, to complete abandonment. We further tested whether the treatments led to changes in species composition, i.e. shifts to different vegetation types.