When climate change is accounted for in restoration planning, practitioners will be better equipped to work within an adaptive management framework to more successfully restore ecosystems and, therefore, conserve biodiversity (Buckley et al. Therefore, to properly restore the biodiversity in degraded ecosystems, climate change must be factored into current and future restoration plans (Harris et al. 2020), here defined as increased temperature accompanied by decreased precipitation and humidity. As a result, many regions around the world are experiencing higher occurrences of extreme weather events, such as heatwaves (Overpeck 2013) (Mazdiyasni and AghaKouchak 2015) (Ades et al. Worldwide, anthropogenic climate change has resulted in global warming and increased variability in the hydrological cycle (Hayhoe et al. However, restoration success is threatened by climate change (Lavendel 2003). Restoration of ecosystems is a key priority in biodiversity conservation globally. These results imply that land managers can proactively compensate for biomass loss due to heatwaves by planting more grass plugs during initial restoration.
This productivity decrease could result in less biomass available for the essential vegetation fire feedback loop, where fire increases grass biomass, and in turn, more grass provides more fuel for fire. We found that while most grass plug individuals survived heatwave conditions, aboveground production was reduced due to heatwaves. We measured plant growth metrics for four understory grasses commonly used in LLP savanna restoration efforts.
#COMMON WORK CONTEXTS FOR NURSERY AND GREENHOUSE MANAGERS SERIES#
To expand our understanding of LLP savanna restoration in light of these changes, we ran a series of three simulated heatwave greenhouse experiments through a Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE) incorporating ~ 150 undergraduate researchers per experiment. In the last few decades, heatwaves have increased in frequency and intensity across the Southeastern USA with further increases predicted. While many restoration efforts are underway to conserve this biodiverse ecosystem, restoration must be done in the context of climate change. The longleaf pine (LLP) savanna ecosystem once covered ~ 92 million acres of the Southeast USA, but due to anthropogenic activities such as logging and fire suppression, only 3% of its once widespread historic range remains.
0 kommentar(er)
