DOI: 10.5061/dryad.crjdfn3b7
title: Ground-dwelling invertebrates and plants following the application of inverted soil mounding on seismic lines

description: In northern Alberta, Canada, much of treed boreal peatlands are fragmented
 by seismic lines – linear disturbances where trees and shrubs are cleared
 for the exploration of fossil fuel reserves. Seismic lines have been shown
 to have slow tree regeneration, likely due to the loss of microtopography
 during the creation of seismic lines. Inverted soil mounding is one of the
 treatments commonly applied in Alberta to restore seismic lines and to
 mitigate the use of these corridors by wildlife and humans. In 2018, we
 assessed the effects of mounding on understory plants and arthropod
 assemblages, three years after treatment application. We sampled in five
 mounded and five untreated seismic lines, and in their adjacent treed fens
 (reference fens) within the Canadian Natural Resources Ltd (CNRL)
 Kirby South in-situ steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) Plant, in the
 Athabasca oil sands (55°22'37.2" N, 111°10'3" W) of NW
 Alberta. Here we provide the species composition at these sites.
description: Ten sites that have been
 disturbed by a seismic line were selected, five of which were treated by
 applying inverted soil mounding. Two parallel 50-m-long transects were
 established at each site, one along the seismic line and the other 50 m
 into the adjacent fen. A sampling point (plot) was established every 10 m
 along each transect. In mounded areas, the mound closest to the sampling
 point was selected. At each sampling point, a 1x1 m quadrat and a pitfall
 trap (with propylene glycol as preservative) were installed to collect
 understory vegetation and ground-dwelling invertebrate data, respectively.
 Vegetation data were collected in a 10-day period in July 2018, and
 invertebrates were collected from May to September of the same
 year.
description: # Ground-dwelling invertebrates and plants following the application of
 inverted soil mounding on seismic lines
 [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.crjdfn3b7](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.crjdfn3b7) The data are provided as an Excel file and consists of five tabs: SiteLocations, PlotIDs, SpeciesList, Abundances, and PercentCovers. The SiteLocations tab contains the list of site codes used to identify individual locations where the data were collected from. Sites correspond to either five untreated (CT1-5) and five treated (MP1-5) seismic lines. Since sites contain paired seismic line-reference fen locations, each site code is accompanied by the corresponding habitat (reference fen, untreated seismic line and mounded seismic line) and the latitude and longitude information. The PlotIDs tab contains the list of plot codes used to identify individual plots within each site. Codes use a combination of the site identifier (CT1-5 or MP1-5), habitat identifier (F: reference fen; L: seismic line) and plot number identifier (1-5) within each transect. The SpeciesList tab contains the full list of species names organized by taxonomic group (ants, ground beetles, rove beetles, spiders and plants) and corresponding family. A species code (consisting of the first four letters of the genus and the first four letters of the species) is provided for each species. These codes are used to identify the individual abundances/percent cover of each species in each plot. The Abundances and PercentCovers tabs include the raw counts and percent cover (in long format) by species for invertebrates and plants, respectively, in each plot. For invertebrates, the counts are pooled number of individuals collected through the period of May-September.