Experimental sites were established in the northern wheat-growing district of western Australia (Lat -29.66°, Long 116.18°) in August 2017, and monitored through to November 2019. We selected five planted old field sites with similar soil types and vegetation composition. Old fields were planted with York gum (Eucalyptus loxophleba Benth.) and dominant shrubs as understorey. At the time of sampling in 2017, vegetation age ranged from 8–13 years and distance from remnant measured 279 m (± 162 m). We established two control and two treatment plots, each measuring 5 m x 5 m, in the interrows of five planted old field sites. Both treatments were randomly assigned to plots within each site. Between August and early November 2017, we measured a total of 30 response variables at each of the control and treatment plots. Response variables included soil physical and chemical properties (bulk density, penetration resistance, soil moisture, nitrogen and carbon pools), microbial biomass, decomposition rate of roiboos and green tea as per the standardized Tea Bag Index (TBI) protocol, herbaceous vegetation cover and richness, and ant abundance and richness, as well as abundance and richness of ant functional groups.

The QBEIS survey database (formerly CORVEG) contains ecosystem physical and vegetation characteristics, including structural and floristic attributes as well as descriptions of landscape, soil and geologic features, collected at study locations across Queensland since 1982. The resulting survey database provides a comprehensive record of areas ground-truthed during the regional ecosystems mapping process and a basis for future updating of mapping or other relevant work such as species modelling.<br /><br /> Only validated survey data is made publicly available and all records of confidential taxa have been masked from the dataset. Data is accessible from the TERN Data Infrastructure, which provides the ability to extract subsets of vegetation, soil and landscape data across multiple data collections and bioregions for more than 100 variables including basal area, crown cover, growth form, stem density and vegetation height.