Data for: Land uplift creates important meadow habitat and a potential original niche for grassland species Alistair G. Auffret and Sara A. O. Cousins, 2018, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: 20172349, doi: 10.1098/rspb.2017.2349 File descriptions: LAND UPLIFT GIS-data: Six GeoTiffs (SWEREF99, ESPG:3006) with 100m resolution showing land uplift during the past 4000 years in the province of Uppland and the area of Södertörn in the province of Södermanland, Sweden. Separate files show total emergence of all land (em), potential coastal meadow defined as uplifted land with slope angles of 0-1 degrees (m1) and 0-2 degrees (m2). Pixel values 0-40 indicate the century during which that pixel of land or potential meadow emerged from the sea, where 1 represents AD 1900-2000 and 40 represents 2000-1900 BC. A zero value means either that the pixel emerged earlier than 2000BC, or that it is still underwater. GeoTiffs must be opened in a GIS program. The six files are named: em_Sodertorn.tif em_Uppland.tif m1_Sodertorn.tif m1_Uppland.tif m2_Sodertorn.tif m2_Uppland.tif Upplift_summary.csv: Summary table of land uplift and potential meadow creation, showing amount of uplift per century plus cumulative uplift through time. Units are km2. PLANT BIODIVERSITY - LOCAL SCALE Plant_surveys.csv: Plant species occurrences in 20 shore meadows in central Sweden. Inventories consist of 12 (in one case 10) 1 m2 squares, arranged along a transect running perpendicular to the coast, in which all plant species occurrences were recorded. See main text and Supporting Information for more details. Nomenclature follows: Karlsson, T. (1997) Förteckning över svenska kärlväxter [The vascular plants of Sweden – a checklist]. Svensk Botanisk Tidskrift, 91, 241–560. Plot_info.csv: Information on the inventoried plots, including management (managed or abandoned), relative age (position along transect) and GPS coordinates. PLANT BIODIVERSITY - LANDSCAPE SCALE Landscape_diversity.csv: Landscape variables, total number of plant species and the number of red listed species in 62 5*5 km landscapes in central Sweden. Each landscape is one grid square of the Swedish Ekonomiska kartan. Coast length and land area were calculated from the Free map of Sweden (1:1 000 000; http://www.lantmateriet.se/en/Maps-and-geographic-information/Maps/Sverigekartor). Meadow area denotes the cover of Baltic meadow vegetation within grasslands listed on the Swedish TUVA database of valuable grasslands (http://www.sjv.se/tuva). The number of species and red listed species are taken from the regional flora of Södermanland (Rydberg, H. & Wanntorp, H.-E. 2001 Sörmlands Flora. Uppsala: SBF Förlaget), downloaded from the Swedish LifeWatch Analysis portal (http://www.artportalen.se). Please cite these data sources appropriately if using the data. Coordinates are the centre points of each grid square, given in SWEREF99 (ESPG:3006).