10.21977/QWQG-WM96
Kimball, Sarah
0000-0003-3789-4741
UC Irvine
Lulow, Megan
UC Irvine
Balazs, Kathleen
Northern Arizona University
Huxman, Travis
UC Irvine
Predicting drought tolerance from slope aspect preference in restored
plant communities
UC Irvine
2017
2017-09-06T19:54:33Z
en
dataset
10.1002/ece3.2881
716621 bytes
1
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Plants employ strategies of tolerance, endurance, and avoidance to cope
with aridity in space and time, yet understanding the differential
importance of such strategies in determining patterns of abundance across
a heterogeneous landscape is a challenge. Are the species abundant in
drier microhabitats also better able to survive drought? Are there
relationships among occupied sites and temporal dynamics that derive from
physiological capacities to cope with stress or dormancy during
unfavorable periods? We used a restoration project conducted on two slope
aspects in a subwatershed to test whether species that were more abundant
on more water-limited S-facing slopes were also better able to survive an
extreme drought. The attempt to place many species uniformly on different
slope aspects provided an excellent opportunity to test questions of
growth strategy, niche preference, and temporal dynamics. Perennial
species that established and grew best on S-facing slopes also had greater
increases in cover during years of drought, presumably by employing
drought tolerance and endurance techniques. The opposite pattern emerged
for annual species that employed drought-escape strategies, such that
annuals that occupied S-facing slopes were less abundant during the
drought than those that were more abundant on N-facing slopes. Our results
clarify how different functional strategies interact with spatial and
temporal heterogeneity to influence population and community dynamics and
demonstrate how large restoration projects provide opportunities to test
fundamental ecological questions.
Each May (late Spring at our study site), from 2012 to 2015, we used
point-intercept, with 24 points per 5 × 5 m plot, to determine the percent
cover of all species.
33.765571
-117.739561