DOI: 10.20350/digitalcsic/15124
title: Long-term monitoring on Percent cover of vascular plants in Do??ana shrublands 2008-2022

description: [Description of methods used for collection/generation of data] The long-term monitoring of plant cover of Do??ana shrublands is part of a harmonised protocol for the Long-term Ecological Monitoring Program of Natural Resources and Processes targeting Terrestrial Vegetation. The general aim of this protocol is to monitor and assess the dynamics of the main dominant terrestrial and aquatic vegetation types of Do??ana. For shrublands, percent cover is recorded annually starting from 2008 to the present (2022) by staff of the Monitoring Team by one sampling campaign per year during the flowering season (between March and May) in 21 permanent square plots (15x15m). Cover is measured using the line intercept method in 3 transects of 15 m length oriented from East to West and located at fixed points of 2.5, 7.5 and 12.5 metres at both sides of the plot. Using the line-intercept method, the coverage of each species is measured with a measuring tape, including the class age (adult or seedling) and the canopy status (green or dead). This method enables to calculate the percent cover for each species across the transect and for the whole plot, including data on class age and percent of dry and green canopy, additionally to the percent of bare soil, plant density, species richness and vascular plant diversity for every plot.
description: [Methods for processing the data] The data was recorded in CyberTracker sequence. The protocol used has been supervised by researchers and the data have been validated by the members who performed the sampling. The raw data was processed with Excel and the percent coverage was calculated and unificated by species, life stage and state.
description: Dataset are structured following well-established data formats. Three files are provided and they are related to each other with the variable eventID. The first file (icts-rbd-shrubPlantCover_event_202300207) contains the information of each event (time of occurrence, geographical coordinates, sampling effort, etc???); the second file (icts-rbd-shrubPlantCover_occ_20230207) contains the percentage of plant cover of shrubland species recorded in each site, numbers of individual recorded and taxonomic classification; the third file (icts-rbd-shrubPlantCover_mof_20230207) contains additional information (measurements or facts) of vegetation recorded in each transect, like average vegetation height.
description: The long-term monitoring on plant cover of Do??ana shrublands is part of a harmonised protocol for the Long-term Ecological Monitoring Program of Natural Resources and Processes targeting Terrestrial Vegetation. The general aim of this protocol is to monitor and assess the dynamics of the main dominant terrestrial and aquatic vegetation types of Do??ana. For shrublands, percent cover is recorded annually starting from 2008 to the present (2022) by staff of the Monitoring Team by one sampling campaign per year during the flowering season (between March and May) in 21 permanent square plots (15x15m). Cover is measured using the line intercept method in 3 transects of 15 m length oriented from East to West and located at fixed points of 2.5, 7.5 and 12.5 metres at both sides of the plot. Using the line-intercept method, the coverage of each species is measured with a measuring tape, including the class age (adult or seedling) and the canopy status (green or dead). This method enables to calculate the percent cover for each species across the transect and for the whole plot, including data on class age and percent of dry and green canopy, additionally to the percent of bare soil, plant density, species richness and vascular plant diversity for every plot.
description: 1. icts-rbd-shrubPlantCover_event_20230207: eventID, institutionCode, institutionID, datasetName, collectionCode, eventDate, year, month, day, verbatimEventDate, eventTime, country, continent, countryCode, stateProvince, county, municipality, locality, locationRemarks, verbatimLocation, verbatimElevation, minimumElevationInMeters, maximumElevationInMeters, decimalLatitude, decimalLongitude, geodeticDatum, samplingProtocol, sampleSizeValue, sampleSizeUnit, samplingEffort and recordedBy. 2. icts-rbd-shrubPlantCover_occ_20230207: eventID, occurrenceID, collectionCode, occurenceTime, decimalLatitude, decimalLongitude, basisOfRecord, recordedBy, identifiedBy, scientificName, verbatimScientificName, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, specificEpithet, scientificNameAuthorship, taxonRank, organismQuantity, organismQuantityType, lifeStage and occurrenceRemarks. 3. icts-rbd-shrubPlantCover_mof_20230207: eventID, measurementID, measurementType, measurementValue, measurementUnit, measurementDeterminedBy, measurementDeterminedDate and measurementMethod.