Fig. 1.

Study area, site selection, experimental design, and field sampling overview for the FunCaB plant functional group experiment. (a) Location of the study area and the 12 study sites in Vestland county, Western Norway. (b) The Vestland Climate Grid is established across independent broad-scale biogeographic gradients in summer temperature (mean of four warmest months, °C), and annual precipitation (mean annual precipitation, mm). Temperature levels are given as boreal, sub-alpine, and alpine; precipitation levels range from 1 (dry) to 4 (wet). (c) Experimental design, with the timeline (species composition recordings [dataset v], seedling recruitment monitoring [vi], ecosystem carbon flux monitoring [vii], and functional group removals [i] indicated, see legend for dataset symbols, for other datasets see text), an overview of the eight factorial removal treatments, and plot layout with subplots used for the community and seedling recording. The removal treatments are described by the functional groups removed from the respective plots, note that in the figure the ‘Intact’ plot refers to the no removal controls whereas the ‘Gap’ are plots with all functional groups removed. For detailed description of treatments and their abbreviations as used in the datasets, see text.