DOI: 10.5061/dryad.cz8w9gj09
title: Meta-analysis on pulse disturbances reveals differences in functional and compositional recovery across ecosystems

description: Most ecosystems are affected by anthropogenic or natural pulse
 disturbances, which alter the community composition and functioning for a
 limited period of time. Whether and how quickly communities recover from
 such pulses is central to our understanding of biodiversity dynamics and
 ecosystem organization, but also to nature conservation and management.
 Here, we present a meta-analysis of 508 (semi-)natural field experiments
 globally distributed across marine, terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems.
 We found recovery to be significant yet incomplete. At the end of the
 experiments, disturbed treatments resembled controls again when
 considering abundance (94%), biomass (82%), and univariate diversity
 measures (88%). Most disturbed treatments did not further depart from
 control after the pulse, indicating that few studies showed novel
 trajectories induced by the pulse. Only multivariate community composition
 on average showed little recovery: disturbed species composition remained
 dissimilar to the control throughout the experiment. Still, when
 experiments showed a higher compositional stability, they tended to also
 show higher functional stability. Recovery was more complete when systems
 had high resistance, whereas resilience and resistance were negatively
 correlated. The overall results were highly consistent across studies, but
 significant differences between ecosystems and organism groups appeared.
 Future research on disturbances should aim to understand these
 differences, but also fill obvious gaps in the empirical assessments for
 regions (especially the tropics), ecosystems and organisms. In summary, we
 provide general evidence that (semi-)natural communities can recover from
 pulse disturbances, but compositional aspects are more vulnerable to
 long-lasting effects of pulse disturbance than the emergent functions
 associated to them.
description: This data set contains all effect sizes between a control and a
 disturbed treatment for 508 experiments used to analyze recovery across
 ecosystems and organisms. A full description of the methods is in the
 paper associated to this manuscript. The data contains 6
 columns. case.ID is a unique identifier for each of the
 508 experiments. Appendix S1 at the paper contains full documentation for
 each of the experiments. resp.cat categorizes the
 response variable as either biomass, abundance, an index of diversity or
 composition. The manuscript details the rationale behind these categries,
 and the detailed variables measures are given in Appendix S1.
 Day of the experiment, with 0 being the pre-distrubance
 day. RD: Relative duration within the experiment, i.e.,
 normalizing the day of the experiment to the duration of the experiment,
 such that 1 is the final sampling date. LRR is the
 effect size of the disturbance, in most cases a log-response ratio, only
 for composition mostly a dissimilarity metric. Again, for detauls see the
 paper's method section var.lrr is the sampling
 variance of the effect sizes, if blank it could not be derived from the
 primary literature.