Acquisitive plant traits are favored during and following drought: insights from two long-term grassland experiments

This dataset contains derived, analysis-ready data used to examine plant community responses to long-term experimental drought and post-drought recovery at two semi-arid grassland sites in the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge, New Mexico, USA: a Great Plains grassland and a Chihuahuan Desert grassland.The dataset was derived from publicly available plant biomass data collected by the Sevilleta Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Program (Baur et al. 2024) and plant functional trait data from Farkas et al. (2021).

The dataset includes plant aboveground biomass and the community-weighted means (CWMs) and functional dispersion (FDis) of six plant functional traits: leaf dry matter content (LDMC), leaf carbon content (LCC), leaf nitrogen content (LNC), stem dry matter content (SDMC), stem tissue density (STD), and root tissue density (RTD). Multivariate functional dispersion and the biomass of major plant functional groups are also included.The Excel file SEV_Ecology_data.xlsx contains four worksheets corresponding to the analyses and figures presented in the associated manuscript: Figure 1a, Figure 1b, Figure 2_3, and Figure 4.