Data from: The ghost of disturbance past: long-term effects of pulse disturbances on community biomass and composition
Description
Current global change is associated with an increase in disturbance frequency and intensity, with the potential to trigger population collapses and to cause permanent transitions to new ecosystem states. However, our understanding of ecosystem responses to disturbances is still incomplete. Specifically, there is a mismatch between the diversity of disturbance regimes experienced by ecosystems and the one-dimensional description of disturbances used in most studies on ecological stability. To fill this gap, we conducted a full factorial experiment on microbial communities, where we varied the frequency and intensity of disturbances affecting species mortality, resulting in twenty different disturbance regimes. We explored the direct and long-term effects of these disturbance regimes on community biomass. While most communities were able to recover biomass and composition states similar to undisturbed controls after a halt of the disturbances, we identified some disturbance thresholds that had long-lasting legacies on communities. Using a model based on logistic growth, we identified qualitatively the sets of disturbance frequency and intensity that had equivalent long-term negative impacts on experimental communities. Our results show that an increase in disturbance intensity is a bigger threat for biodiversity and biomass recovery than the occurrence of more frequent but less intense disturbances.
Notes
code_ghost_disturbance_past.R : main file to produce all the figures of the manuscript. Open it with statistical software R. To run it entirely, you will need the following R-packages: 'ggplot2', 'grid', 'RColorBrewer', 'scales' 'scico' and 'sciplot'. You will also need the R functions 'multiplot.R', 'param_heatmaps_biomass.R', 'param_heatmaps_sp.R" and 'stats_fun.R' as well as the data files 'community_biomass.Rdata' and 'table_species_PA.txt' provided along with this code in the same repository to produce the figures. All files were created using R version 3.5.1 (2018-07-02).
community_biomass.Rdata : file with the time series of community biomass for all the microcosms.
table_species_PA.txt : file with species presence/absence (1/0) for all the microcosms at the end of the experiment (t = 39).
multiplot.R, param_heatmaps_biomass.R and param_heatmaps_sp.R : R functions used to create the heatmaps in Figure 2-4.
stats_fun.R : R function to compute the statistics presented in Table S2.
Funding provided by: Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung
Crossref Funder Registry ID: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100001711
Award Number: PP00P3_179089
Funding provided by: University of Zurich Research Priority Program "URPP Global Change and Biodiversity"
Crossref Funder Registry ID: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100006447
Award Number:
Funding provided by: Universität Zürich Forschungskredit*
Crossref Funder Registry ID:
Award Number: K-74335-03-01
Funding provided by: University of Zurich Research Priority Program "URPP Global Change and Biodiversity"*
Crossref Funder Registry ID:
Funding provided by: Universität Zürich Forschungskredit
Crossref Funder Registry ID:
Award Number: K-74335-03-01
Files
table_species_PA.txt
Files
(53.2 kB)
| Name | Size | Download all |
|---|---|---|
|
md5:99e6a882ed6e0ba69b734e2c9a761cf1
|
12.3 kB | Download |
|
md5:9a0aacdc820069f8f099cbbebe97caa7
|
32.4 kB | Download |
|
md5:eeceec616342348799e303db92bbc82b
|
1.1 kB | Download |
|
md5:76e281117f0f29f383c0e8ac2aea4dc8
|
1.6 kB | Download |
|
md5:0e14075e8c96c1c10ab22ace86ef78c6
|
1.3 kB | Download |
|
md5:dfb91fb3870ac61c29f9212b6a8504b0
|
1.0 kB | Download |
|
md5:f0c5cffb886e17fa5d938b0ba94f6ad2
|
3.4 kB | Preview Download |