Overcoming resistance and resilience of an invaded community is necessary for effective restoration: a multi‐site bracken control study

Abstract

Summary1. The search for appropriate management strategies to control invasive plants is an important theme in environmental management. However, the recovery of the resident community species complement does not necessarily respond predictably to restoration efforts. Increasing restoration success requires an understanding of the resistance and resilience of the invaded community and the response of the newly developing community to management. Here, we used Pteridium-invaded heath and grass communities as a test system and investigated the effects of recommended Pteridium aquilinum control treatments on vegetation composition and diversity. 2. We evaluated seven field experiments in four regions of Great Britain designed to test five Pteridium control treatments, including 'one-off' (applied only at the start) and 'repeated' (applied regularly) treatments, against an untreated experimental control. The sites had context-dependent restoration targets, either a Calluna heathland or acid grassland. Species cover and diversity responses (higher plants, mosses plus lichens) to these treatments were monitored annually for 10 years. 3. Pteridium control treatments induced significant change in species composition compared to experimental controls in both vegetation types. On Calluna target sites, 'repeated' treatments overcame the resistance of the invaded community producing a gradual divergence in species composition and species diversity. In contrast, the 'one-off' treatments were ineffective. 4. At the acid grassland target sites, all treatments overcame the resistance of the Pteridiumdominated state producing changes in species composition in comparison with experimental controls. 5. Synthesis and applications. There are two important results for land managers: (i) where Calluna heathland is the target, 'repeated' treatments (cutting once or twice per year) were effective in overcoming the resistance of invaded community and moving species composition towards the target state, effectively creating an alternative state; (ii) where acid grassland is the target both 'one-off' and 'repeated' treatments overcame the invaded community resistance ('one-off' also overcame resilience) producing changes in species composition in the desired direction. The effectiveness of 'one-off' treatments was site dependent and produced alternative stable states within 10 years. In contrast, 'repeated' treatments were site independent but took longer to work and were more expensive.

Mushroom biomass and diversity are driven by different spatio-temporal scales along Mediterranean elevation gradients

“…Although, we do not present any long-term temporal trend to validate this hypothesis, there is evidence for sustained low sporocarps biomass production over the last few decades in Mediterranean areas of Spain with exceptionally greater productivity in some years (e.g. 2014)38.…”

“…It seems that temporal effects, here arising from yearly environmental variations, should be taken into account in epigeous sporocarps biomass production studies36, because they will affect the results obtained and conclusions drawn37. In contrast to our expectations, richness showed greater within-space variation than temporal variation (64% spatial vs. 28% temporal, Table 1), which suggest that sporocarp richness is mainly dependent on common species compositional differences between localities and plots38.…”

Herbivory and drought generate short‐term stochasticity and long‐term stability in a savanna understory community

“…To assess the long-term interactive effects of rainfall and herbivore treatments on plant community composition, we used Principal Response Curve (PRC) analysis ( Van den Brink and Ter Braak 1999, Pardal et al 2004, Alday et al 2012. PRC is a specialized form of redundancy analysis (RDA) designed for multivariate, repeated-measures data.…”

Evaluation of wild animals browsing preferences in forage resources

“…Aims of this technique are to recreate areas useful for wild animals feeding (Cervasio et al, 2016) and to recover other important ecosystem services related to open areas, such as landscape heterogeneity or ecological diversity (Laiolo et al, 2004;McAllister et al, 2014;Rossetti et al, 2015). Open areas can be maintained for a long time only utilising proper restoration strategies and maintenance techniques (Alday et al, 2012). Thus, it is of a great importance to propose methods and parameters to monitor effects of restoration and evolution along time (Cervasio et al, 2016).…”