Data for: Landscape-moderated biodiversity effects of ground herb cover in olive groves: implications for regional biodiversity conservation.
Description
Processed data and list of species detected in this study. Data come from bird, ant and herb species richness collected in monthly surveys during a year in 20 localities distributed throughout the most important areas of olive cultivation in Andalusia. These localities encompass a wide gradient of landscape complexity and were initially classified according three levels of complexity: simple, intermediate and complex landscapes. Data were collected from paired sampling design with an intensive olive farmland (ground herb cover persistently removed over the year) and an extensive olive farmland (ground herb cover maintained most of the year) per locality. The two farmlands of each locality are embedded in a landscape within 2 km circular radius that was characterized in terms of compositional and configurational landscape heterogeneity metrics using recent land use cartography. Farmlands are classified also according to size into two categories: large farmlands (larger than 50 ha) and small farmlands (smaller than 25 ha), corresponding the farmlands of a same locality to the same size category. Within each olive farmland, 50 m radius circular sampling stations were located in both productive and unproductive zones (4 and 2 stations, respectively in small farmlands; 6 and 4 stations, respectively in larger farmlands). Species richness data and other estimations are produced from rarefied species accumulation curves. Multidiversity (overall biodiversity) is estimated as the mean z-scores across groups (Maestre et al., 2012; Birkhofer et al. 2018). Z-scores were obtained separately for each taxonomic group from the mean and standard deviation of the normal distribution of its estimated species richness across the 40 olive farms under study.