Cleveland State University Cleveland, Ohio, United States
Background/Question/Methods:
Understanding how restoration seeding practices can influence plant communities is important to future planning of natural areas. Restoration outcomes can be variable, and it is important to assess restoration success at many sites, as well as over longer time periods. One way to quantify changes in plant communities following restoration is to examine the taxonomic and functional traits of the new plant communities, and compare these over time, or spatially across similar areas. We performed a before-after survey of a new meadow restoration, as well as a regional survey examining multiple different regional restoration efforts. In the before-after survey, we quantified the plant community before and after restoration, in areas restored with native plants using two different methods (drilling and broadcast seeding). In a regional survey, five paired restored and unrestored areas were monitored for three years. For both studies, the North Carolina Vegetation Survey protocol was used to measure the plant community, and taxonomic and functional diversity metrics were used to quantify the impact of restoration on the resident plant community.
Results/Conclusions:
In the before- after survey, broadcast seeding led to higher establishment of desired species and a higher community weighted mean coefficient of conservatism, indicating somewhat higher conservation value established. However, drill seeding led to a higher diversity of native species overall. Functionally, meadow restoration significantly changed community weighted means and functional evenness of leaf dry matter content, height, and rooting depth. Functional dispersion of leaf dry matter content decreased for both seeding methods. There were however no significant differences in multi-trait functional evenness and dispersion between methods or over years. These results suggest that differences arise early in restoration in terms of individual traits may not yet be evident in multi-trait metrics.
In the regional survey, native species richness and diversity were similar in restored and unrestored areas, but the abundance of native species increased with time after restoration. From a functional trait and diversity perspective, there was no difference between restored and unrestored meadows. However, there were significantly higher mean coefficients of conservatism in restored versus unrestored areas. Floral phenology patterns also revealed that seed mixes used in restoration might benefit from additions of more spring and fall flowering plants, for better floral provisioning.
