Medicinal Plant Cover and Diversity After Prescribed Burns in Spanish Forests

Approximately one year after seasonal prescribed burns, this dataset contains plant cover and diversity assessments from 12 plots in Pinus nigra forests of the Serranía de Cuenca Mountains, Spain. It was authored by Á. Fajardo-Cantos and published on figshare under a CC-BY-4.0 license. The data includes species classifications by Raunkiaer life-forms and medicinal uses based on ICD-11 therapeutic categories.

Use Cases

• Modeling short-term fire effects on medicinal plant availability based on plant cover and diversity metrics.
• Analyzing the relationship between plant functional traits and post-fire persistence based on Raunkiaer life-form classifications.
• Investigating shifts in therapeutic resource availability based on ICD-11 medicinal use categories.
• Assessing the impact of burn seasonality on plant community composition based on comparisons of spring, summer, and autumn burns.

Strengths

• Includes data from 12 plots at a specific elevation range of 1,250–1,300 m a.s.l.
• Integrates both functional (Raunkiaer life-forms) and therapeutic (ICD-11 categories) classifications for species.
• Provides a direct comparison of three distinct burn seasons: spring, summer, and autumn.

Limitations

• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Data reflects a single post-fire time point approximately one year after burning, limiting temporal analysis.

Provenance

Source

Á. Fajardo-Cantos via figshare.

Collection Method

Plant cover and diversity were assessed in field plots approximately one year after prescribed burning.

Time Range

Data collected approximately one year after prescribed burns.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04 08 05:29:50; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Serranía de Cuenca Mountains, central–eastern Iberian Peninsula, Spain.