Coastal Biodiversity and Ecosystem Service Sustainability (CBESS) dry weight root biomass from three soil depths on salt marsh sites at Morecambe Bay and Essex

Roots were collected by taking sediment cores (16cm diameter, 30cm depth). The cores comprised of soil, intact roots and above ground vegetation. The roots were exposed by washing away the soil in a recirculating flume and then divided into three depth section. 0cm to 10 cm, 10cm to 20 cm and 20cm to 30cm. The roots were then dried at 60 degrees centigrade for 72 hours and weighed. Results were converted from kilogrammes of dry weight per core area to kilogrammes of dry weight per square metre. The location of the sample sites was determined by randomly allocated quadrats. Each site consisted of a rectangular area of saltmarsh between 400 x 500 m to 1000 x 1000 m in size, dependent upon saltmarsh length (parallel to shore) and width (perpendicular to shore), including part of the low, mid and high marsh zones. Twenty two 1 x 1 m quadrats were randomly allocated to each site rectangle using R (R Development Core Team, 2014) to specify four different spatial scales (A = 1 quadrat only, B = 3 quadrats at 1 m to 10 m apart, C = 6 quadrats at 10 m to 100 m apart, D = 12 quadrats at 100 m t 1000 m or site maximum).

This dataset is included in the following collections

Biological, ecological and physical data collected from salt marsh and mudflat sites on the West and East coast of England during the winter and summer of 2013 by the Coastal Biodiversity and Ecosystem Service Sustainability (CBESS) project