differences in plant community between treatments?

[emchristensen]

Are there differences in plants between treatments, particularly around the 1990 changepoint, that could help explain why PE and RM declined quickly on control plots but more gradually on krat exclosures?

Some things to look at: species richness, total plant abundance, abundance of just grasses
(check out Brown and Heske 1990 “Control of a Desert-Grassland Transition by a Keystone Rodent Guild”)

Also (Heske, Brown, Mistry 1994 “Long-term experimental study of a Chihuahuan desert rodent community: 13 years of competition”) talks about how removing krats increased grassiness, with cascading effects for other rodent species.

[diazrenata]

I did a first pass at this here: https://github.com/weecology/LDA-kratplots/blob/plants/plants.md

Looking at it roughly, there don't seem to be large differences in abundance/richness in early 1990 (compared to the variation throughout the time series). I'll have a look at grasses only next.