To understand how grasslands may “keep up” with climate change, we need to understand the basis for their responses to environmental change. By planting material from a range of locations in the Great Plains, we can elucidate how different populations could potentially fill the expanding C3 niche in North Dakota. Our aim is to test whether we can create prairies that are more resistant to invasive species by increasing early season competition with southern ecotypes of native cool-season grasses. Our hypothesis is that ecotypes of grasses from more southern latitudes will green-up earlier and better resist invasive cool-season grasses. We set up a total of 48 1 m x 1 m plots at the University of North Dakota research plot near Arvilla, North Dakota. The species of interest are Canada wildrye (Elymus canadensis) and Junegrass (Koeleria macrantha). The plots are in a randomized block design consisting of one control, three treatments, and 12 replicates of each plot type. The control plot is of a Western Minnesota origin. These regions consist of Iowa, Nebraska/Missouri, and Wisconsin which represent a range of current and future climate scenarios compared to Western Minnesota and Eastern North Dakota.
Results/Conclusions
There was a difference in cover by state in 2018, but that effect was lost in 2019. We ran a multi response permutation procedure using the ‘vegan’ package in R. In 2018, we recorded differences between states (A= 0.07002, p=0.017). In 2019, there were no significant differences between states (A=0.0168, p=0.13). We measured phenology in the community plots in both 2018 and 2019. In 2018 phenology for Minnesota and Nebraska were similar across community plots, while Iowa and Wisconsin tracked closely together. In 2019 phenology was similar for all tested ecotypes. Junegrass established poorly across plots, although Minnesota ecotypes performed the best overall. Canada wildrye from Nebraska and Minnesota established significantly better than Iowa or Wisconsin in 2018. In 2019, Minnesota and Nebraska plots had the highest proportion of die off, which left all plots with roughly the same average cover of Canada wildrye. Overall, we did not get results supporting our hypothesis across years. Although, we did see some promise from Nebraska Canada wildrye in the first year, those gains were lost the second year.