The Maestre lab starts to publish and share databases

With the aim to foster the use and public impact of the research carried out at the Maestre lab, we are starting to share all the research data we produce. This will be a slow process, given the large amount of data we have gathered over the years (and are gathering right now!), but we will do it in a continuous way (as we say in Spain “sin prisa pero sin pausa”, i.e. without hurry but without stop). Our idea is to release all the data associated with every future paper as soon as they are published, and to prepare and share all the data from papers already published that may be of broad interest. 

We will post and share our data using different ways, such as data papers (in Ecology or in Dataset Papers in Ecology), online appendices to the articles posted in the journal´s webpage (as we have recently done with our multifunctionality paper published in Science) or public repositories such as Dryad, which is widely used by the ecological and evolutionary scientific community.

These are the first databases going open, which have been posted on Dryad:

Maestre FT, Reynolds JF (2006) Biomass responses to elevated CO₂, soil heterogeneity and diversity: an experimental assessment with grassland assemblages. Oecologia 151: 512-520. Dryad Digital Repository. doi:10.5061/dryad.3488j

Maestre FT, Puche MD, Guerrero C, Escudero A (2011) Shrub encroachment does not reduce the activity of some soil enzymes in Mediterranean semiarid grasslands. Soil Biology and Biochemistry 43: 1746-1749. Dryad Digital Repository. doi:10.5061/dryad.s022h

The data from the following articles will also soon be available in dryad:

Escolar, C., I. Martínez, M. A. Bowker & F. T. Maestre. 2012. Warming reduces the growth and diversity of biological soil crusts in a semi-arid environment: implications for ecosystem structure and functioning. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (in press).

Maestre, F. T. & J. F. Reynolds. 2006. Spatial heterogeneity in soil nutrient supply modulates nutrient and biomass responses to multiple global change drivers in model grassland communities. Global Change Biology 12: 2431-2441.

Maestre, F. T. & J. F. Reynolds. 2007. Amount or pattern? Grassland responses to the heterogeneity and availability of two key resources. Ecology 88: 501-511.

Maestre, F. T., M. Bradford & J. F. Reynolds. 2005. Soil nutrient heterogeneity interacts with elevated CO₂ and nutrient availability to determine species and assemblage responses in a model grassland community. New Phytologist 168: 637-650.

We will also be compiling all the databases we share in the specific section of the Maestre lab webpage.

Enjoy and use the data!