README FILE

Project: Urban Forest Management project 2007-2009

Citation: Koivula et al. 2019: Effects of undergrowth removal and edge proximity on ground beetles and vascular plants in urban boreal forests. Journal of Urban Ecology (in press).

Contact: Matti Koivula (mjkoivula@gmail.com)

Data processing: study design by Matti Koivula, Markku Kuitunen, Elisa Vallius and Tiina Virta, beetle collecting (pitfall traps) and vegetation inventory (percent covers based on multiple 1-m2 plots) by Virta, laboratory identification of sample specimens by Virta, Koivula and Vallius. Data contain pooled (beetles) or average (plants) samples per sampling station over the whole summer (3 per stand, at different edge distances).

Analysis software: R 3.4.4 with vegan, car, MASS and lme4 packages.

Data: Koivula_JUE-2019_data.csv

site: Site abbreviation (compare Fig. 1)
treat: Treatment (untreated or treated with undergrowth removal)
harvyear: Harvesting (= treatment) year (2009 = treated in the winter 2008/09, 2007 = treated in the winter 2006/07)
harvtreat: Harvesting year combined with treatment (CONTROL = untreated, TREAT09 = treated in the winter 2008/09, TREAT07 = treated in the winter 2006/07)
edgedist: distance to stand edge (0, 10 or 20 m toward interior patch)
cara.samples: For carabids only, the number of samples collected (max 16)
cara.eff: Sampling effort for carabids, based on cara.samples (proportion; 1 = all 16 samples collected; lower if some samples were lost)
plant.sha: Plant diversity index (Shannon-Wiener H)
plant.sim: Plant evenness index (Simpson J)
plant.sp: Plant number of species
cara.sha: Carabid diversity index (H)
cara.sim: Carabid evenness index (J)
cara.sp: Carabid number of species
cara.for: Abundance of forest carabids pooled
cara.gen: Abundance of generalist carabids pooled
cara.ope: Abundance of open-habitat carabids pooled
cara.forsp: Number of species for forest carabids
cara.gensp: Number of species for generalist carabids
cara.opesp: Number of species for open-habitat carabids
plant.for: Percent cover of forest plants
plant.gen: Percent cover of generalist plants
plant.ope: Percent cover of open-habitat plants
plant.forsp: Number of species for forest plants
plant.gensp: Number of species for generalist plants
plant.opesp: Number of species for open-habitat plants

The subsequent columns show species indicated with 4+4 letter abbreviations, carabids first; e.g. AMARCOMM = Amara communis (numbers of individuals) and acerplat = Acer platanoides (percent covers).