Lupclip: Annual mowing has the potential to reduce the invasion of herbaceous Lupinus polyphyllus

In order to manage invasive plant species efficiently, it is necessary to have a thorough understanding of different strategies of population control, including the underlying mechanisms of action and the consequences for target populations. Here, I explored the effectiveness of biomass removal as a method of control for the invasive perennial herb Lupinus polyphyllus. More specifically, using seed material from 11 populations, I assessed among-population variation (if any) in plant compensatory growth as a response to annual biomass removal under standardised growing conditions over two consecutive years, and quantified the demographic effects of a single biomass-removal event. In all study populations, annual biomass removal reduced plant size, flowering probability, and shoot and root biomass. Biomass removal also reduced plant survival and the number of flowering shoots, but these effects were pronounced at certain time points only. A population-level demographic analysis revealed that a single biomass-removal event considerably decreased the long-term population growth rate (λ); this decline in λ was due to a reduction in plant fecundity followed by survival and growth. These findings suggest that annual mowing has the potential to curb invasions of L. polyphyllus because plants are not able to fully compensate for drastic biomass loss.Lupclip_README.txt: Readme file a detailed description of the variables in each file. Lupclip_time.xlsx: Measurements of individual plants of Lupinus polyphyllus in four time points. Lupclip_biomass.xlsx: Plant dry biomass at the end of the experiment. Lupclip_IPMdata.xlsx: Demographic data of Lupinus polyphyllus from two consecutive years. Lupclip_IPM.txt: An R-code to construct an integral projection model and calculate the deterministic population growth rate with 95% confidence intervals based on bootstrapping. Funding provided by: Academy of FinlandCrossref Funder Registry ID: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100002341Award Number: 285746This dataset of Lupinus polyphyllus was collected based on a common garden study in the Ruissalo Botanical Garden of the University of Turku, Finland during 2017-2018. Individuals that died before the first clipping treatment in June 2017 (n = 40 individuals out of 880) have been deleted from the data