Abstract
One of the key questions in ecosystem restoration is the choice of the seed material for restoring plant communities. The most common strategy is to use local seed sources, based on the argument that many plants are locally adapted and thus local seed sources should provide the best restoration success. However, the evidence for local adaptation is inconsistent, and some of these inconsistencies may be due to different experimental approaches that have been used to test for local adaptation. We illustrate how conclusions about local adaptation depend on the experimental design and in particular on the method of data analysis. We used data from a multispecies reciprocal transplant experiment and analyzed them in three different ways: (1) comparing local vs. foreign plants within species and sites, corresponding to tests of the “local is best” paradigm in ecological restoration, (2) comparing sympatric vs. allopatric populations across sites but within species, and (3) comparing sympatric and allopatric populations across multiple species. These approaches reflect different experimental designs: While a local vs. foreign comparison can be done even in small experiments with a single species and site, the other two approaches require a reciprocal transplant experiment with one or multiple species, respectively. The three different analyses led to contrasting results. While the local/foreign approach indicated lack of local adaptation or even maladaptation, the more general sympatric/allopatric approach rather suggested local adaptation, and the most general cross‐species sympatric/allopatric test provided significant evidence for local adaptation. The analyses demonstrate how the design of experiments and methods of data analysis impact conclusions on the presence or absence of local adaptation. While small‐scale, single‐species experiments may be useful for identifying the appropriate seed material for a specific restoration project, general patterns can only be detected in reciprocal transplant experiments with multiple species and sites.
Highlights
Ecosystem restoration is globally recognized as a key component in conservation programs and essential for the long-term sustainability of our human-dominated planet (Aronson & Alexander, 2013)
If a posterior probability was greater than 0.95, we considered this evidence of local adaptation, and if the probability was below 0.05, we considered the results as evidence for maladaptation
The debate on seed-s ourcing strategies for ecosystem restoration largely depends on the outcome of studies testing for local adaptation (Breed et al, 2013; Broadhurst et al, 2008)
Summary
Ecosystem restoration is globally recognized as a key component in conservation programs and essential for the long-term sustainability of our human-dominated planet (Aronson & Alexander, 2013). One main strategy for the choice of seed material for ecosystem restoration is so-c alled local provenancing (Hamilton, 2001) that is the use of local seed sources It is based on a large body of evidence that populations of many plant species are adapted to their local environments, and local plants have a higher fitness than foreign ones (e.g., Becker, Colling, Dostal, Jakobsson, & Matthies, 2006; Bucharova et al, 2017; Joshi et al, 2001; Raabová, Münzbergová, & Fischer, 2011). The “home vs away” approach compares performance of plants in their local environment to their performance in other environments (Kawecki & Ebert, 2004) This approach has the lowest ability to detect local adaptation (Blanquart et al, 2013), and because it is the least relevant in the context of seed-sourcing strategies for ecosystem restoration, we do not consider it further. We used data from a recent reciprocal transplant experiment with multiple grassland species (Bucharova et al, 2017) and analyzed the data in three different ways: (1) comparing local vs. foreign plants within species and sites, (2) comparing sympatric vs. allopatric populations across sites but within species, and (3) comparing sympatric and allopatric populations across multiple species
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