Bird exclosure experiment and berry damage and fecal transect surveys on California strawberry farms

This dataset contains information on 1) berry damage and invertebrate sampling from a bird exclosure experiment (N=15), and 2) berry damage and bird fecal contamination from transect surveys (N=20) on organic strawberry farms in the California Central Coast in 2018. We excluded birds from strawberry plants with mesh-net cages and compared berry damage and insect communities between exclosure (no birds) and control (bird accessible) plots. We erected three paired exclosure and control plots on each farm for one month each during the spring (April-May, when strawberry yields were low) and summer (June-July, during peak strawberry production). Each week, we harvested berries from treatment plots and scored all ripe berries for damage. At the beginning and end of each round of the exclosure experiment, we vacuum-sampled invertebrates from eight plants within each plot. We surveyed berry damage and bird fecal contamination along three parallel, 20m transects in strawberry rows on each farm. Berry damage surveys were limited to 20 plants per transect, sampling every 5 plants. We located exclosures and transects at the farm edge with the most seminatural habitat, as far from a farm edge as a possible, and halfway in between.