Dispersal and disturbance as factors limiting the distribution of rare plant species at the Savannah River Site and the Carolina Sandhills National Wildlife Refuge.

[摘要] An experiment was conducted to identify effective methods of creating new populations of herbaceous species in managed upland longleaf pine forest at two locations in the Fall-line Sandhills of South Carolina. We included thirteen species and a variety of site treatments. All sites were burned and lightly raked prior to planting. Sowing seeds on untreated or fertilized treatments resulted in the lowest establishment of all treatments. Digging the planting area to remove belowground plant structures and using hardware cloth cages to exclude potential mammalian seed predators and herbivores led to increased establishment of target species. Establishment was higher using seedling transplants compared to seeds. Success rate was highly variable among sites so population establishment efforts should try to incorporate many sites initially to find the sites that give the greatest chance of success, or increase efforts to carefully identify species, habitat requirements and screen potential sites accordingly. Some species showed very low rates of success despite the variety of methods used; for such species additional work is required on their basic ecology, in particular germination biology and site requirements, as part of a restoration project. The overall low rate of establishment success emphasizes the need to protect and manage existing populations of uncommon Sandhills species, and to recognize that establishing large, long-term, reproducing populations of such species will be difficult.

[发布日期] 2003-12-10 [发布机构] Savannah River Forest Station

[关键词] Upland Longleaf Pine;Forests;Transplants Rare Plant Establishment;Disturbances;Carolina Sandhills