DOI: 10.5061/dryad.sqv9s4n7n
title: Twenty years of Salix height in response to experimental manipulation of browsing and water table, northern range of Yellowstone National Park

description: This respository contains multiple datasets collected during a 20 year
 investigation of the responses of willow (Salix spp.) communities in
 Yellowstone National Park after the restoration of large
 carnivores.  The study sought to understand whether the
 restoration of wolves to the food web cause a change in the state of
 willow communities that occured while wolves were absent. Each dataset has
 a corresonding file of metadata. 
description: Sampling and experimental designs and methods used to collect the
 data were described in Hobbs, N. T., D. B.
 Johnston, K. N. Marshall, E.C. Wolf, and D. J. Cooper. Does restoring apex predators to food webs
 restore<br>ecosystems?
 Large carnivores in Yellowstone as a model system. Ecological Monographs. 
 In press.
description: The data could be process further with almost any program, but we
 used R version 4.2.1 (2022-06-23) (R Core
 Team, 2022. R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. R
 Foundation forStatistical
 Computing, Vienna, Austria) and the following
 packages: [1] "cowplot"   
 "gridExtra"  "bayesplot" 
 "HDInterval"<br> [5] "MCMCvis"   
 "rjags"      "doParallel" "iterators"
 <br> [9] "foreach"    "dclone"    
 "Matrix"     "parallel"  <br>[13]
 "coda"       "forcats"    "stringr"   
 "dplyr"     <br>[17] "purrr"     
 "readr"      "tidyr"      "tibble"  
  <br>[21] "ggplot2"    "tidyverse" 
 "stats"      "graphics"  <br>[25]
 "grDevices"  "utils"      "datasets"  
 "methods"   <br>[29] "base" 
 All of these programs are open-source
description: # Twenty years of Salix height in response to experimental manipulation of
 browsing and water table, northern range of Yellowstone National Park ####
 Special thanks to the National Science Foundation Collection of the the
 data provided in this repository was supported by awards from the National
 Science Foundation to Colorado State University (DEB 0717367, 1147369,
 1655035) #### Description of data collection Experimental and sampling
 designs as well as descriptions of data collection procedures can be found
 in: Hobbs, N. T., D. B. Johnston, K. N. Marshall, E.C. Wolf, and D. J.
 Cooper. Does restoring apex predators to food webs restore ecosystems?
 Large carnivores in Yellowstone as a model system. Ecological Monographs.
 In press. #### Description of data files *
 fall\_height\_data\_2001\_2020.csv contains annual measurements of height
 of individual willows at the end of the growing season. Metadata are found
 in fall\_height\_data\_metadata.pdf. * browsing\_data\_2003\_2020.csv
 contains annual plant level observations of the number of stems browsed
 out of a sample of observed stems on individual willow plants during
 spring. Meta data are found in browsing\_data\_metadata.pdf *
 well\_data\_2002\_2020.csv contains monthly measurements of water table
 depth during the growing season. Metadata are found in well\_metadata.pdf
 * bison numbers revised.csv and Bison\_data\_2003\_2020.csv contain annual
 counts of bison on the northern range. Metadata are found in
 Bison\_count\_metadata.pdf * Camera\_Master\_2012-2015 contains analysis
 of images from camera traps. Metadata are found in
 camera\_trap\_metadata.pdf * corrected\_elk
 counts\_09Jul2023\_Park\_only.csv contains sightability corrected counts
 of elk on the northern range. Metadata are found in corrected\_elk
 counts\_09Jul2023\_Park\_only\_metadata.pdf * NR\_cougar\_density.csv
 contains estimates of cougar density on the northern range. Metadata are
 given in NR\_cougar\_density.pdf *
 wolf\_1995\_2022\_population\_ynp\_nr\_nnrr.csv contains annual counts of
 wolves on the northern range. Metadata are found in
 wolf\_1995\_2022\_population\_ynp\_nr\_nnrr\_metadata.pdf *
 beaver\_site\_height\_data\_2015\_2019 contains observations of height at
 beaver-occupied, observational, and experimental sites during fall.
 beaver\_height\_data\_metadata.pdf contains associated metadata *
 Site\_names\_and\_locations.csv gives the names of sites and their
 locations in utm's