DOI: 10.5061/dryad.1g1jwsv78
title: Resistance and resilience of species composition: Thirty years of experimental mismanagement and subsequent restoration in a species rich meadow

description: Traditionally managed grasslands are among the most species rich
 communities, which are threatened by land use changes – management
 intensification or abandonment. The resistance of their species
 composition to mismanagement and ability to recover after re-establishment
 of traditional management is of prime conservational interest. In
 a manipulative experiment in a wet meadow, we simulated mismanagement by a
 factorial combination of abandonment of mowing and fertilization. The
 dominant species Molinia caerulea was removed in half of the plots to
 assess its role in community dynamics. The 21 years’ mismanagement period
 was followed by the re-establishment of the traditional management. The
 plots were sampled yearly from 1994 (the baseline data, before
 introduction of the experimental treatments), until 2023. Estimates of
 cover of all vascular plant species provided the species richness and
 effective number of species. For each year, the chord distances to
 baseline species composition and to corresponding control plot were
 calculated. The compositional data were analyzed by constrained ordination
 methods, and the univariate characteristics by Repeated Measures ANOVA.
 All the plots, including those with traditional management throughout the
 whole experiment, underwent directional changes, probably caused by a
 decrease in groundwater level due to global warming. Both fertilization
 and abandonment lead to a loss of competitively weak, usually low-statured
 species, due to increased asymmetric competition for light. The effect of
 fertilization was faster and stronger than that of abandonment
 demonstrating weaker resistance to fertilization. The removal of dominant
 species partially mitigated negative effects only in unmown,
 non-fertilized plots. The recovery following mismanagement cessation was
 faster (signifying higher resilience) in unmown than in fertilized plots,
 where it was slowed by a legacy of fertilization. In a changing world, two
 reference plot types are recommended for assessment of resistance and
 resilience, one original state, and one reflecting compositional changes
 independent of treatments.
description: # Title of Dataset: Resistance and resilience of species composition:
 thirty years of experimental mismanagement and subsequent restoration in a
 species rich meadow --- The dataset contains five lists. The first list
 contains compositional data for individual species across all 24 plots for
 all the years of the study (1994-2023). It is coded, for example, as
 r1994p1 which corresponds to the year 1994 and plot id 1. Each column
 (2-97) contains species covers. Zeroes refer to species missing from
 communities, so their cover value is a true zero. The values are in
 relative, i.e. expressed as a percentage. Note that the relative species
 covers do not sum up to 100% but can exceed it as individual species can
 overlap in the vertical profile. The data was used for the calculation of
 plot level species richness and pairwise chord distances. These data also
 served as an entry for all multivariate analyses providing information
 about temporal changes in community structure. See details in Methods. The
 second list contains information about experimental setting (which plots
 were mown, fertilized or Molinia caerulea removed) effective number of
 species and community weighted mean of the species vegetative height (cm).
 The third list contains information about nutrient levels (total
 phosphorus and total nitrogen) in each plot in the year 2022. The fourth
 list contains information about temperature and precipitation for the
 study period. These data that are under free copyright license for
 non-commercial use, were downloaded from the Climate Change meteoblue
 model, which utilizes data from ERA5, the fifth generation ECMWF
 atmospheric reanalysis of the global climate (accessible at:
 [https://www.meteoblue.com/en/climate-change/ohrazen%c3%ad_czechia_3069123](https://www.meteoblue.com/en/climate-change/ohrazen%c3%ad_czechia_3069123)) The fifth list contains detailed information about all variables in the preceding lists. ## Description of the Data and file structure Details about data structure and meaning of individual columns are described in detail in the fifth list in the .xlsx file.