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Monitoring of vegetation and fire in Florida scrub, flatwoods, and wet prairie in south-central Florida from 1977-2015

This data package is comprised of three datasets all pertaining to the impacts of prescribed fires and wildfires on vegetation at 11 permanent transect sites over nearly four decades at Archbold Biological Station (ABS) in south-central Florida. Data were collected between 1977 to 2015 in wet prairies, flatwoods, oak scrub, rosemary scrub, and hickory scrub. The first dataset, cover_data, contains year and month of sampling at a given transect site, the vegetation association type, burn unit, and the percentage cover data for sampled species and bare ground. The second dataset, fire_occurrence, includes the dates of each fire that impacted each transect site, the burn unit of the transect, and the percentage of transect burned. The third dataset, species_information, includes the scientific name, common name, plant family, and nativity of each sampled species. A fourth unpublished dataset provides the GPS locations for all the aluminum posts that mark each of the 11 transects. These data are available from the Archbold data manager. Below we summarize the setup and data collected for each dataset. Cover_data: We determined the percentage cover (i.e., dominance) of each encountered species at 11 vegetation stands including two wet prairies (WS20, WS21), three flatwoods (WS30, WS42, WSP1), and six Florida scrub associations including four oak scrubs (WS26, WSP2, WS24, WS25, the latter two include areas of rosemary scrub), a rosemary scrub (WS27), and a hickory scrub (WS29). Each stand was sampled at selected times, ranging from five to as many as 12 repeated samplings, during the 38-yr period beginning in 1977 and continuing to 2015. Stands were sampled during January (mid-way during the winter dry season) except for sampling four stands in May 1977 and eight stands in July 1977 to document short-term 4-month and 6-month vegetation recovery following the initial January 1977 prescription burn. At each permanently marked transect site, we sampled 200 m using two parall