Uncovering the little known impact of a millennia-old traditional use of temperate oak forests: free-ranging domestic pigs markedly change the herb layer, but barely affect the shrub layer (Q6717986)

This excel file contains data on ground, herb and shrub layer characteristics of hardwood floodplain forests under different disturbance intensity by free-ranging domestic pigs, a millennia-old practice in Eurasia. We used these dataset to create figures 3, 4, 5, 6 (a) (b), 7, 8 presented in the paper Uncovering the little known impact of a millennia-old traditional use of temperate oak forests: free-ranging pigs markedly change the herb layer, but barely affect the shrub layer. Vegetation surveys were conducted in the spring and late summer periods of 2017 and 2018. The bare soil surface and litter cover were visually estimated within each 0.25 ha sampling plot. The cover and composition of the herb layer were recorded using 30 subsamples (1 m2) at each SP (altogether 1680 subsamples). 28 subsamples were located along the four cardinal directions at 2 m distances running from the centre of sampling plots and 2 other subsamples were randomly positioned. The total cover of the upper (higher than 130 cm) and lower (50-130 cm) shrub layer, and the cover of each species by layers, were visually estimated in each 0.25 ha SP. The browsing, rooting and rubbing impacts of pigs were measured along a 56-m-long transect running through the centre of the SPs from north to south. We sampled altogether from 3138 to 3282 woody specimens depending on variables used to describe pigs impacts on specimens.