Occurrence of plants in plots along the Gunnison River, Colorado, 1990-2017

In 1990 the US Geological Survey Fort Collins Science Center and National Park Service Water Resources Division established 133 permanent 1meter (m) X 2 m plots along the Gunnison River near Warner Point in Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park. A one-dimensional hydraulic model was calibrated to determine the inundation necessary to inundate each plot, and this can be combined with daily flow data to determine the inundation duration or percentage of time a plot is under water. Occurrence of all plant species in these plots was determined in late July of 1990, 1994, 2001, 2006 and 2013. This data set includes 3 csv files of plot data. One file gives characteristics of plots, including plot name, inundating discharge, mean number of species occurring in the plot, mean vegetative cover, Mean Sorensen Index and mean inundation duration with flows exponentially weighted for recency using a half-life of 1.5 years. A second file gives characteristics of all the plant species that have occurred in the plots including scientific and common names, plant family, life span, occurrence of rhizomes, height, total occurrences across years, median inundating discharge of plots containing the plant, half-life for exponential weighting of flows selected by regressions relating species occurrence to flow in each sample year, slope, probability and variance of half-life regressions, and the optimum inundation duration, probability and variance of logistic regressions relating occurrence of species in all sample years to flow. A third file documents occurrence of species in plots in all five sample years as well as the inundation duration, number of species and total vegetative cover in each plot in each sample year. The 1990 data were interpreted by Auble et al. (1991 and 1994), and all five years of data were interpreted by Friedman et al. (2022). This data set also includes a library of repeat views of the river bars containing the plots photographed from the same set of 21 camera locations in 1990, 1994, 2001, 2006, 2013 and 2017, a total of 117 images. Finally, this data set also includes a csv file listing the years each view was photographed and the approximate latitude and longitude of each camera location.