Seed bank and big sagebrush plant community composition in a range margin for big sagebrush

Abstract

. 2016. Seed bank and big sagebrush plant community composition in a range margin for big sagebrush. Ecosphere 7(10):e01453. 10.1002/ecs2.1453Abstract. The potential influence of seed bank composition on range shifts of species due to climate change is unclear. Seed banks can provide a means of both species persistence in an area and local range expansion in the case of increasing habitat suitability, as may occur under future climate change. However, a mismatch between the seed bank and the established plant community may represent an obstacle to persistence and expansion. In big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata) plant communities in Montana, USA, we compared the seed bank to the established plant community. There was less than a 20% similarity in the relative abundance of species between the established plant community and the seed bank. This difference was primarily driven by an overrepresentation of native annual forbs and an underrepresentation of big sagebrush in the seed bank compared to the established plant community. Even though we expect an increase in habitat suitability for big sagebrush under future climate conditions at our sites, the current mismatch between the plant community and the seed bank could impede big sagebrush range expansion into increasingly suitable habitat in the future.

Quantifying the relationship between soil seed bank and plant community assemblage in sites harboring the threatened Ivesia webberi in the western Great Basin Desert

“…heathland (Valbuena and Trabaud, 2001), salt marshes (Egan and Unger, 2000), alpine sites (Ma et al, 2010), wetlands (Jutila, 2003;Aponte et al, 2010), forest/grassland mosaic (Díaz-Villa et al, 2003), natural and planted forests (Lemenih and Teketay, 2006), and particularly for desert ecosystems (Guo et al, 1999;Gomaa, 2012), including the Great Basin Desert (Martyn et al, 2016;Barga and Leger, 2018).…”

“…In addition, some seedlings did not survive beyond the seed-leaf stage and could not be identified. This is a common issue with employing the seedling emergence method, which has been reported in previous studies in the Great Basin Desert (see Allen and Nowak, 2008;Martyn et al, 2016).…”

“…Many of these species produce relatively few healthy seeds which have limited dispersal capacity and form a transient seed bank (Lee, 2004; Goodwillie et al, 2005; Pekas and Schupp, 2013). Most studies in the Great Basin Desert have reported dissimilarities in the above‐ground vs belowground floristic composition (Pekas and Schupp, 2013; Martyn et al, 2016), suggesting a limited role of the soil seed bank in the regeneration of desert perennial species (Allen and Nowak, 2008; Bossuyt and Honnay, 2008; Gomaa, 2012). Moreover, vegetative recovery is not dependent on the seed bank alone, as regrowth from surviving vegetative structures of perennial plants can be quite important (Milberg, 1993; Bullock et al, 1995).…”

Current reclamation practices after oil and gas development do not speed up succession or plant community recovery in big sagebrush ecosystems in Wyoming

“…). After returning to the laboratory, we processed samples using a modification of the method used by Martyn et al (). We sieved all samples through a 2‐mm sieve to remove rocks and plant material.…”

STEPWAT2: an individual‐based model for exploring the impact of climate and disturbance on dryland plant communities

“…For simplicity, we represented each functional type by a single plant species (Table ), which are both common and widely distributed in big sagebrush ecosystems in our data sets (Martyn et al. , Pennington et al. ).…”