Effects of revegetation approaches on wetland plant community reassembly under hydrologic extremes

• Published in: Wetlands ecology and management Vol. 33; no. 1; p. 11
• Main Authors: Houde, Maddie, Kettenring, Karin M.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01.02.2025; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Aquatic ecosystems; Best practice; Best practices; Biomedical and Life Sciences; Conservation Biology/Ecology; Drought; Drought resistance; drought tolerance; Effectiveness; Environmental conditions; Environmental Law/Policy/Ecojustice; Environmental restoration; Extreme drought; flooding tolerance; Freshwater & Marine Ecology; Great Salt Lake; Growing season; Hydrology; Hydrology/Water Resources; Indigenous plants; Indigenous species; Invasive plants; invasive species; land restoration; Life Sciences; Marine & Freshwater Sciences; Original Paper; Plant communities; Planting; Planting date; Plants; Revegetation; Seeding; species; species recruitment; Tolerances (dimensional); Utah; Water Quality/Water Pollution; wetland plants; Wetlands; Great Salt Lake; Utah; Abiotic factors; Wetland restoration; Invasion resistance; Seeding; Planting
• ISSN: 0923-4861; 1572-9834
• DOI: 10.1007/s11273-024-10015-2

Active revegetation is often necessary to recover native plant communities in disturbed or degraded wetlands. However, active revegetation has been pursued less often in wetlands than other ecosystems and thus, there are few established best practices to guide implementation. Additionally, wetland revegetation is challenging due to dynamic hydrology becoming more extreme and high invasive plant propagule pressure that can limit native plant recruitment and favor invasive plant dominance. In this study, we tested the efficacy of varied revegetation approaches on native plant reassembly and invasion resistance in semi-arid wetlands subject to seasonal hydrologic fluctuations. In a Great Salt Lake wetland in Utah, USA, we introduced two functionally distinct native plant mixes, varied their method of introduction via seeding or planting, and varied their order of introduction over two planting dates. Unfortunately, there were no treatment effects on native or invasive cover, likely due to extreme drought in the first growing season followed by excessive flooding in the second. However, there were compositional shifts from drought-tolerant to flood-tolerant species throughout the study. Community compositional changes underscore the importance of including species with divergent and wide-ranging environmental tolerances in revegetation mixes to enhance native establishment across variable environmental conditions. This bet-hedging approach runs counter to the current focus on precision restoration—the method of prioritizing the “right seed in the right place at the right time”—but may be an effective strategy to combat unpredictable conditions given increasingly extreme site conditions.