DOI: 10.5061/dryad.0vt4b8h71
title: Relative effects of seed mix design, consumer pressure, and edge proximity on community structure in restored prairies

description: A central goal of ecosystem restoration is to promote diverse,
 native-dominated plant communities. However, restoration outcomes can be
 highly variable. One cause of this variation may be the decisions made
 during the seed mix design process, such as choosing the number of species
 to include (sown diversity), or the number of locations each species
 should be sourced from (source diversity, manipulated to affect genetic
 diversity). The effects that seed mixes have on plant communities may be
 further modified by other factors at the restoration site, including edge
 proximity and consumer pressure, which are also likely to vary over time.
 However, few studies have evaluated these seed mix attributes together,
 and none have done so under realistic field conditions. To address this
 research need, we conducted a prairie restoration experiment where two
 aspects of a seed mix (sown diversity and source diversity), edge
 proximity, and vertebrate consumer access were manipulated across 12
 replicate fields. We found that when seed mix design impacted plant
 community structure, these effects were dependent on consumer access or
 edge proximity and were more prominent after one vs. five growing seasons.
 Low seed source diversity plots had more sown species than high source
 diversity ones, but only when consumers had access. Similarly, low species
 diversity plots had higher richness and cover of species included in both
 the low and high species diversity mixes, but this effect weakened over
 time. Additionally, plots with high species-diversity were buffered from
 the typically detrimental effects of edges and consumers, although this
 did not always result in greater sown species abundance. Unexpectedly,
 plots with the most sown species were those sown with either low source
 diversity or low species diversity seed mixes, perhaps due to lower
 seeding rates of reliably establishing species. Our results illustrate how
 the influences of seed mix design on restored plant communities can be
 highly contingent on factors like edges, consumers, and time.
description: Data for this manuscript was collected in 2015 and 2021 from a
 long-term prairie experiment at Kellogg Biological Station where two
 aspects of a seed mix (sown diversity and source diversity), edge
 proximity, and vertebrate consumer access were manipulated across 12
 replicate fields. Data was analyzed with R studio using provided
 code.
description: # Relative effects of seed mix design, consumer pressure, and edge
 proximity on community structure in restored prairies
 [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.0vt4b8h71](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.0vt4b8h71) This includes all the data and R code responsible for producing the above manuscript in Ecological Applications. We broadly find that increasing the number of seed sources did not impact the assembled plant communities, but did have species-specific effects. ## Description of the data and file structure There are two CSV files attached: "CLE.2015-2021.csv" which includes all the data used to produce this manuscrip * We only have canopy cover ("Avg.open.sky" in dataframe) and water holding capacity ("whc") for data collected in 2021--so 2016 data have "NA" values "CLE_Exclosures_meta.csv" which includes descriptions of all the column names in "CLE.2015-2021.csv" ## Sharing/Access information NA # Code/Software "CLE.analyses.R" which includes all the code used to produce the analyses and figures presented in the mansucript. All packages required are listed at the top of the document.