Data underlying the publication: "Quantifying soil resistance to sheet and lateral erosion across different habitats on a managed sandy back-barrier island"

Authors: Beatriz Marin-Diaz, Valérie C. Reijers, Linda Meijers, Daphne van der Wal, Han Olff, Tjeerd J. Bouma, Laura L. Govers

**General information**

In this study we quantified the erosion resistance to hydraulic forces of a sandy back-barrier island by i) correlating the top and lateral soil erosion resistance to sediment and vegetation properties and ii) relating these properties to the past management and development of the island. Testing soil cores taken over the biogeomorphic gradient from (1) barrier dune-ridge, (2) back-barrier salt marshes to (3) unvegetated tidal flat edges revealed that only the salt marsh was erosion resistant, and that this erosion resistance was different between lateral and topsoil erosion. All marsh samples had a cohesive top layer (due to finer grained sediment, high root density and organic content) that was resistant to top erosion. The resistance to lateral erosion depended on the thickness of this cohesive top layer: thin cohesive layers (< 10 cm) collapsed when the sandy bottom underneath was eroded.

The data is divided in two folders:

**1_raw_data**

This folder contains the raw data for: 
  - sediment properties: "Calculations Sediment properties lab.xlsx"
  - cohesive layer thinkness from cores and locations across the island: "cohesive_layer_thickness_all_profiles.csv"
  - Sediment grain size: "grain_size_lab.xlsx"
  - Lateral erosion for all the time steps: "lateral_volume_loss_raw.xlsx"
  - Top erosion for all the time steps: "top_erosion_raw.xlsx"
  - Belowgoround vegetation properties measured in the lab: "vegetation.xlsx"

**2_statistical_analysis**

This folder contains the code utilised for the statistical analysis and the figures in the manuscript: analysis_griend_erosion.r

The input data for the R script is:
  - variables_Griend_R.csv:	contains the data for the main plots and analysis
  - variabes_griend_R_boxplot_sand.csv: contains data for the supplementary soil properties boxplots separated by top soil properties (L1) and bottom soil properties (L3)