Data and Materials for Nesslage et al. 2026 - Plant species richness responses to microtopography across a vernal pool complex revealed by UAV-LiDAR
Description
The repository is organized in terms of the data used in the Nesslage et al. 2026 study titled 'Plant species richness responses to microtopography across a vernal pool complex revealed by UAV-LiDAR', the outputs from the statistical analyses performed, and the scripts used to perform the analyses on the data. We reasoned that as hydrology is an important driver of the distribution of plant communities across vernal pools, we should be able to use digital elevation models obtained over vernal pool complexes with drone-based LiDAR to generate hydrological proxies that enable prediction of plant spatial patterns. We generated high resolution (1m) hydrologic proxies related to hydroperiod, hydrologic connectivity, and soil moisture from drone-mounted LiDAR and created models to estimate the number of total plant species, as well as the number of forbs and graminoids across a vernal pool complex. We found that models using UAV-LiDAR derived parameters enabled spatial predictions of plant species richness to within 2-3 species. Herein, we provide the data, outputs of the statistical analysis, and the scripts to enable reproduction of the results obtained.
Files
Institutions
- University of California MercedCA, Merced