Patterns of Plant Composition in Fragments of Globally Imperiled Pine Rockland Forest: Effects of Soil Type, Recent Fire Frequency, and Fragment Size

Vegetation Monitoring to Guide Management Decisions in Miami's Urban Pine Rockland Preserves

“…The majority of the County's upland preserves are pine rockland, a fire-adapted, globally critically imperiled plant community (FNAI 2010). Managers of Miami-Dade's pine rocklands must address a perfect storm of issues including high endemism, fragmentation, urban interface, fire exclusion (Snyder et al 1990;Possley et al 2008), and non-native plant species introduced en masse through the area's booming nursery industry (Garofalo 2002). Pre-settlement extent of pine rocklands was approximately 75,000 hectares.…”

Spatial heterogeneity of soils of the Cerrado-Pantanal ecotone

“…The soil, an essential natural resource, is noteworthy due to its spatial heterogeneity, which maximizes the biodiversity of a particular ecosystem (POSSLEY; WOODMANSEE; MASCHINSKI, 2008) either through taxonomic, functional and genetic pedodiversity or because of the heterogeneity of the soil attributes (DUNIWAY; BESTELMEYER; TUGEL, 2010).…”

Pollination, Herbivory, and Habitat Fragmentation: Their Effects on the Reproductive Fitness of Angadenia berteroi, a Native Perennial Plant of the South Florida Pine Rocklands

“…We also found that A.berteroi is more abundant in fragments with low subcanopy cover; these results are in accordance with our previous studies, where we reported that A.berteroi is more abundant in larger fragments with higher fire frequency ). Other studies (Possley et al 2008) have also reported that fragment size had a positive influence on understory species richness, and A. berteroi is one of the species with the greatest mean coverage in sites with high fire frequency in that study as well. Our results also showed seedling density to be negatively correlated with litter depth and indirectly correlated to subcanopy cover.…”

“…The introduction of exotic species also plays an important role affecting plant abundance and seedling germination of rare native plants (Yates & Ladd 2005). Even though we do not have data to examine the correlation between nonnative species and the abundance of A. berteroi, the increase in canopy cover due to the high incidence of non-native species reported in the remaining pine rockland fragments (O'Brien 1998;Possley et al 2008), and the negative correlation between A. berteroi density and subcanopy cover suggest that the introduction of exotics also has the negative effects on this pine rockland species. The fact that seedling density at a site was not correlated with the mean number of flowers and fruit per plant in the SEM models, contrary to our expectations, indicates that habitat quality (litter depth and subcanopy cover) plays a strong role in controlling seedling germination and establishment of A.…”