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Table 1: Plant community composition as affected by tortoise exclusion (trt), plot-level variation (pair), sampling period (rep) and interactions among tortoise exclusion, plot spatial structure, and sampling period. PERMANOVAs were conducted with 999 permutations using Bray-Curtis’s (abundance-weighted) dissimilarity index on estimated plant cover. Df = degrees of freedom, SumsOfSqs = sums of squares, MeanSqs = mean squares, F = F statistics, R2 = partial R-squared, and p = p value.