Figure captions
Figure 1. Study design. a) Design of one temporary fence. The temporary fence allows the most heavily grazed area of the permanent fence to only be grazed every other year. b) Plot setup at five temporary fences. Each temporary fence has one pair of triplicate plots, except for fence 4, which has two pairs of triplicates. Each triplicate has one plot that was grazed every year (i.e. press grazing), one plot that was grazed every 2nd year (i.e. pulse razing) and one plot that was lightly grazed. One triplicate in each pair was placed in a drier area (D), while the other triplicate was placed in a wetter area (W).
Figure 2. Plant community structure is altered by pulse and press reindeer grazing and in wet vs. dry plots. Non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) of a Bray-Curtis distance matrix describing vascular plant communities in Fennoscandia. NMDS is an ordination technique that creates a 2-dimensional representation of highly dimensional data. Each point symbolizes a plant community from an individual plot (n = 140) and colours display the characteristics of each plot: a) plots with light, pulse, or press reindeer grazing, b) plots in wet or dry areas and c) the year the plot was sampled in. The stress value, a measure of the disagreement between the rank order in the data set and the 2-dimensional NMDS, is 0.18.
Figure 3. Shrub species are replaced by grass species in plots with pulse and press grazing. The effect of reindeer grazing on a) shrubs species richness, b) herbs species richness, and c) graminoid species richness in Fennoscandia. Different numbers indicate statistical significance between groups at the P < 0.05 level, tested using an ANOVA in a linear mixed effects model.
Figure 4. The phylogenetic dispersion of plant communities increases in plots with pulse but not press grazing. The effect of reindeer grazing on a) phylogenetic dispersion (calculated from species presence/absence data) and b) abundance-weighted phylogenetic dispersion (calculated from relative species abundance data) of vascular plant communities in Fennoscandia. Values of phylogenetic dispersion close to 0 represent phylogenetically clumped communities, while values close to 1 represent phylogenetically dispersed communities. Different numbers indicate statistical significance between groups at the P < 0.05 level, tested using an ANOVA in a linear mixed effects model, controlling for a) the proportion of species that are graminoids and b) the proportion of the relative abundance that are graminoids.