Data were collected from a common garden drought experiment in the Austrian Central Alps using intact vegetation-soil monoliths from an extensively managed meadow and a nearby abandoned grassland. The monoliths were installed in summer 2013 on the meadow site and pre-incubated until drought simulation was started in early summer 2014. The effects of land use on the response of plant C allocation and plant-microbial C transfer to drought and rewetting were studied by conducting two 13C pulse-chase labelling campaigns. A description of all data and abbreviations used in the excel file can be found in tab "0-README"