DOI: 10.6078/d1970g
title: Assessing impacts of social-ecological diversity on resilience in a wetland coupled human and natural system: Data release

description: Theory posits that resilience of ecosystems increases when there is a
 diversity of agents (e.g., species) and linkages between them. If
 ecosystems are conceptualized as components of “coupled human and natural
 systems”, then a corollary would be that novel types of human-induced
 diversity may also foster resilience. We explored this hypothesis by
 studying how socially created diversity mediated the impact of a
 historically severe drought on a network of wetlands in the foothills of
 the California Sierra Nevada containing a metapopulation of the threatened
 California Black Rail (Laterallus jamaicensis coturniculus). We examined
 how (1) diversity in motivations for land ownership affected use of
 irrigation water and response to drought, (2) differences in natural and
 irrigated water sources affected wetland drying in response to drought,
 and (3) these processes affected the persistence of rails and the
 transmission risk of West Nile virus, an emerging infectious disease that
 threatens people and rails. Wetlands were mostly fed by inefficiencies and
 leaks from the irrigation system. Wetlands with both natural and irrigated
 water sources were larger, wetter, and likelier to persist through drought
 because these two sources showed response diversity by drying at different
 times. Wetlands with diverse water sources also provided the best habitat
 for the California Black Rail, and irrigation appeared responsible for its
 persistence through the drought. Irrigation increased WNV transmission
 risk by increasing the quantity, but not the quality, of wetland habitats
 for mosquitoes. The impacts of social diversity were more ambiguous, with
 redundancy prevalent. However, profit-motivated landowners provided
 wetlands more irrigation during non-drought conditions, while other
 landowner types were more likely to continue providing irrigation during
 drought. This dataset provides the wetland, California Black Rail, and
 West Nile virus data that support the findings of this
 study. Partial social and geospatial data are available by
 emailing the first author upon request, excluding some
 information that would make respondents identifiable.
description: We mapped all emergent
 wetlands &gt; 5×5 m within our study area—California’s Sierra Nevada
 foothills EPA zone III eco-region in Yuba, Nevada, and southern Butte
 countieso of California. Mapping was done by manually interpreting summer
 2013 GeoEye-1 0.4 m imagery in Google Earth 7.1.5. Areas covered by
 hydrophytes (<i>Typha</i> spp., <i>Scirpus</i>
 spp., <i>Juncus effusus</i>, <i>Leersia
 oryzoides</i>, or various sedges) were considered wetland. We
 included hydrophytes that appeared seasonally dried; if green vegetation
 was present along the wetland-upland transition zone, we buffered 5 m into
 it. Open water and rice were excluded. If imagery was ambiguous, we used
 Google Earth imagery from adjacent years to help distinguish if a wetland
 was present. Each wetland’s geomorphology was classified as slope (shallow
 hillside flow), pond fringe, fluvial, rice fringe, irrigation ditch, or
 waterfowl impoundment. We combined historic imagery and field data to
 determine the water sources. We surveyed 237 wetlands for occupancy of
 Black Rails up to three times each summer from 2012–2016 using established
 broadcast survey methods (for details see Richmond et al. 2010).
 To assess the effects of
 water source on wetland hydrology, we resurveyed wetlands for 14 periods:
 in the early wet season (January 8–27), late wet season (March 22–25),
 early dry season (May 17–June 20), and late dry season (July 15–August 15)
 from summer 2013–2016. At each visit we walked throughout the wetland with
 a map of aerial imagery and recorded the percent wetness (areal percent of
 wetland saturated with water). We
 trapped mosquitoes at 63 wetlands from June–October, 2012–2014 (4710
 trap/nights) and estimated WNV prevalence (probability of a mosquito
 testing positive for WNV) with genetic testing. We estimated WNV
 transmission risk at each wetland as the mean abundance of WNV-infected
 <i>Culex</i> spp. (the main WNV vectors) per
 trap/night.
description: Note that wetland data is not a comprehensive list of all
 wetlands in the region. Missing values for black rail occupancy in some
 years or visits within years are delineated with