The Wilds, a conservation facility in southeastern Ohio, represents a unique research opportunity as it sits on nearly 10,000 acres of reclaimed strip mine land. Prairie offers a great option for restoration of highly degraded ecosystems where reestablishing pre-mining habitats is difficult. Originally, the 20 acre site was created to evaluate biomass production in 330 prairie plots following differing preparation treatments, fertilizer and deep ripping, and addition of six different prairie seed mixes. However, due to the lack of management and differences in initial establishment success, the site is in varying degrees of restoration success. This has created the unique opportunity to test mechanisms involved in restoration and community assembly. The goal of this research is to use ecological theory and the current site conditions to test whether trait based approaches can be used to improve restoration outcomes. Initial vegetation surveys took place in all 330 plots in 2016. After surveying the current community, each species was characterized according to key functional traits: growth form, nitrogen fixation, photosynthetic pathway, and life history. The species by trait matrix was analyzed using cluster analysis and PERMANOVA to understand variation in the functional community composition based on historical treatments.
Results/Conclusions
A cluster analysis classified plots into six different community types and broadly identified 61 plots where the original prairie mixes maintained well established populations of prairie grasses, 89 plots with moderate establishment, and 180 plots where there was low abundance of prairie species. Further analyses suggested that the functional makeup of the community is associated with the original seed mix (p<0.05), whether plots were fertilized (p<0.05), and their location across the site (block; p<0.05). This study suggests that regular management of an ecosystem is important, and that an understanding of the functional makeup of an ecosystem can be an important tool to selection of successful supplementary seed mixes to restore diversity and function to these landscapes.