Abstracts

To develop the following abstracts, the editorial staff searches more than 100 scientific journals, professional and organizational newsletters, conference proceedings, and other resources for information relevant to ecological restoration practice and research. Please send suggested abstract sources to the editorial staff (ERjournal@aesop.rutgers.edu).

Climate Change

Ecological Niche Modeling under Climate Change to Select Shrubs for Ecological Restoration in Central Mexico. 2015. Gelviz-Gelvez, S. (Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Hidalgo, Doctorado en Biodiversidad y Conservación, Apartado Postal 69 plaza Juárez, 42001 Pachuca, Hidalgo, Mexico, milena1181@hotmail.com), N. Pavon, P. Illoldi-Rangel and C. Ballesteros-Barrera. Ecological Engineering 74: 302–309. doi: 10.106/ j.ecoleng.2014.09.082.

Land managers and restoration practitioners are being urged to consider the impacts of climate change in long-range strategy plans as many parts of the world are already seeing impacts of a warming planet. Making the most educated predictions as to what the future climate might support is made easier with the utilization of the most powerful tools at our disposal. Ecological niche models are currently used to project species distributions and, when paired with climate change predictions, can plan for the most suitable plant assemblage in the future. Researchers led by Gelviz-Gelvez applied these models to a semiarid shrubland site in Central Mexico after inventorying all shrub species in 17 remnant shrublands. Using PCA the team considered percent cover, density, frequency, sociability and mycorrhizal presence to narrow 46 species down to 10 and then applied the climate change scenario to determine which species would maintain or increase distribution. In semi-arid Central Mexico, Acacia schaffneri, Ageratina espinosarum, Bursera fagaroides, Dalea bicolor, Eysenhardtia polystachya, and Karwinskia humboldtiana were the six winners in the climate simulations for the region.

Dry Forest Resilience Varies under Simulated Climate-management Scenarios in a Central Oregon, USA Landscape. 2014. Halofsky, J. S. (Washington State Department of Natural Resources, 1111 Washington Street SE, P.O. Box 40716, Olympia, Washington 98504–7016 USA, joshua.halofsky@dnr.wa.gov), J. E. Halofsky, T. Burcsu and M. Hemstrom. Ecological Applications 24: 1908–1925. doi: 10.1890/13-1653.1.

Restoration and conservation practitioners are facing more challenges than ever before. Accounting for climate change makes this work even more complicated, but is a reality that should not be ignored. For long-lived species like the Ponderosa Pine, this is especially true. Washington State Department of Natural Resources led an investigation of the current management plans for dry-forests and modeled them with accepted climate projections to better understand if current management options were adequate for the long-term protection of this forest type. They compared fire suppression to active management that included controlled burns, thinning and salvage logging, and planting. Overall they found that active management was the only way to assure resilience. Under their models, dry-forests would not have the internal resilience to ‘bounce-back’ from the high intensity and higher frequency burns expected with continued warming trends, without proactive management of reduced fuel loads. The authors provocatively conclude that “Land managers planning for a future without climate change may be assuming a future that is unlikely to exist.”

Agricultural Peatland Restoration: Effects of Land-use Change on Greenhouse Gas (CO₂ and CH₄) Fluxes in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. 2015. Knox, S. (Ecosystem Science Division, Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA, 510-717-8964, saraknox@berkeley.edu), C. Sturtevant, J. Hatala Matthes, L. Koteen, J. Verfaillie and D. Baldocchi. Global Change Biology 21: 750–765. doi: 10.1111/gcb.12745.

Nutrient rich peatlands have been ditched and drained for farming and settlement for thousands of years. Long-term effects of direct and indirect peat loss include land subsidence and increased atmospheric CO₂ as peat oxidizes in the absence of water. Flooding has been used to combat these issues, but there are concerns that methane emissions, a more powerful greenhouse gas (GHG), are worse in wetland ecosystems. In this study, Knox et al. compared year-round variation of CO₂ and CH₄ in varying land-use types in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta: two drained agricultural peatlands (a...