The intersection of management, vegetation, and moth communities in a 40-year-old prairie restoration Part I: Vegetation

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Deanna Deterding and Kurt E. Schulz, Department of Biological Sciences, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, Edwardsville, IL

Background/Question/Methods
Prairie ecosystems provide important ecological services that are essential to humans as well as other organisms. Sadly, remnant prairie is scarce within the US. Even within the Prairie State, Illinois, only about 0.1% of prairie remains. In most prairie restorations, plant species richness begins to decline after a few decades instead of steadily increasing. This suggests important flaws in establishment and management techniques. Given that many restorations currently exist, we focus on management strategies that could have large impacts on the presence and dominance of prairie plant species and ultimately change moth community composition as well. We evaluate this by first examining how different management strategies in a single, large prairie restoration site can affect plant species diversity and dominance. We hypothesized that different management strategies such as burning, mosaic burns, brush hogging, and no management would yield significant variation in the abundance and diversity of multiple species. We obtained late-season composition data by tabulating species frequency in 0.25 m2 quadrats along 50 m transect lines in a set of 10 sampling areas undergoing various management regimes.
Results/Conclusions
Study plots showed compositional differences between burned and unburned plots. Burned plots were dominated mostly by grasses such as Andropogon gerardii and Sorghastrum nutans. Unburned plots showed much less abundance of these species. We tested whether plot composition was affected by management strategy (annual full burns, annual mosaic burns, brush hogging, and no management) or location in reference to surrounding vegetation (i.e., forest, agricultural field, and mowed grass). Both factors were significantly correlated with vegetation distance based on Mantel tests. When the effects of management system and surrounding vegetation were reciprocally removed by partial correlation, only management system was significantly correlated (r = 0.44, p =0.008). This experiment is part of a larger study comparing the correlation of moth and plant communities. We suspect that since management has an effect on plant community composition, moth community composition will also be affected. Overall, restoring prairie as a mosaic of vegetation determined by a variety of management strategies could benefit moth communities as well.