DOI: 10.5061/dryad.8g3rv46
title: Data from: Taking plant-soil feedbacks to the field in a temperate grassland

description: Plant-soil feedbacks (PSFs) involve changes to the soil wrought by plants,
 which change biotic and abiotic properties of the soil, affecting plants
 that grow in the soil at a later time. The importance of PSFs for
 understanding ecosystem functioning has been the focus of much recent
 research, for example, in predicting the consequences for agricultural
 production, biodiversity conservation, and plant population dynamics.
 Here, we describe an experiment designed to test PSFs left by plants with
 contrasting traits under field conditions. This is one of the first,
 large- scale field experiments of its kind. We removed the existent plant
 community and replaced it with target plant communities that conditioned
 the soil. These communities consisted of contrasting proportions of grass
 and forb cover and consisted of either fast- or slow-growing plants, in
 accordance with the plant economics spectrum. We chose this
 well-established paradigm because plants on opposite ends of this spectrum
 have developed contrasting strategies to cope with environmental
 conditions. This means they differ in their feedbacks with soil abiotic
 and biotic factors. The experimental procedure was repeated in two
 successive years in two different subplots in order to investigate
 temporal effects on soils that were conditioned by the same plant
 community. Our treatments were successful in creating plant communities
 that differed in their total percentage cover based on temporal
 conditioning, percentage of grasses versus forbs, and percentage of fast-
 versus slow-growing plants. As a result, we expect that the influence of
 these different plant communities will lead to different PSFs. The unique
 and novel design of this experiment allows us to simultaneously test for
 the impacts of temporal effects, plant community composition and plant
 growth strategy on PSFs. Here, we describe the experimental design and
 demonstrate why this effective design is ideal to advance our
 understanding of PSFs in the field.
description: Plant community data
 from a plant-soil feedbacks grassland experimentcommunity ID: six
 different plant communties were used to condition the soil; see Methods
 section of the paper for details raw forb cover: uncorrected percentage
 cover of forbs present in each subplot based on field estimation raw grass
 cover: uncorrected percentage cover of grasses present in each subplot
 based on field estimation raw legume cover: uncorrected percentage cover
 of legumes present in each subplot based on field estimation raw total
 cover: uncorrected percentage cover of all plants present in each subplot
 based on field estimation relative forb cover: corrected percentage cover
 of forbs as a percentage of the total plant cover in each subplot relative
 grass cover: corrected percentage cover of grasses as a percentage of the
 total plant cover in each subplot relative legume cover: corrected
 percentage cover of legumes as a percentage of the total plant cover in
 each subplot raw fast species cover: uncorrected percentage cover of fast
 growing plant species that were sown in each subplot raw slow species
 cover: uncorrected percentage cover of slow growing plant species that
 were sown in each subplot relative fast species cover: corrected
 percentage cover of fast growing plant species that were sown in each
 subplot relative slow species cover: corrected percentage cover of slow
 growing plant species that were sown in each subplot relative other
 species cover: corrected percentage cover of other plant species (i.e.,
 not target fast or slow growing species) that were sown in each
 subplotDe
 Long et al. 2019 BAAE data.xlsx