Abstract
Sowing grasses supports the rapid development of a closed perennial vegetation, which makes the method universally suitable for fast and effective landscape‐scale restoration of grasslands. However, to increase their diversity and to create a natural‐like species‐rich grassland is a challenging task. Understanding the role of seed bank compositional changes and vegetation dynamics can help to design management regimes that support the establishment of target species and suppress unwanted weeds. Our aim was to reveal the effect of post‐restoration management on the vegetation and seed bank dynamics in grasslands restored in one of the largest European landscape‐scale restoration projects. Eight years after restoration, we sampled the vegetation and the seed bank in 96 quadrats located in 12 restored grasslands in the Great Hungarian Plain. In each grassland stand, we studied and compared a mown (mown from Year 1 to Year 8) and an abandoned plot (mown from Year 1 to Year 3 then abandoned from Year 4 to Year 8). Mown and abandoned plots showed divergent vegetation and seed bank development. Abandonment led to the decline of sown grasses and higher cover of weeds, especially in the alkaline grasslands. Our study underlined that the developing seed bank had a limited contribution to the maintenance of biodiversity in both grassland types. We found that 5 years of abandonment had a larger effect on the seed bank than on the vegetation. We stress that long‐term management is crucial for controlling the emergence of the weeds from their dense seed bank in restored grasslands.
Highlights
The restoration of degraded ecosystems is an important strategy to mitigate the negative impacts of human activities on Earth
The cover of weeds was affected by management and grassland type (Table S1), with the highest cover of weeds in alkaline grasslands and in abandoned plots (Fig. 1B)
We found that abandoned grasslands are characterized by a lower cover of sown perennial grasses and higher cover of weeds compared to mown ones, which partly confirmed our first hypothesis
Summary
Grassland restoration is widely applied in nature conservation to increase landscape connectivity, create habitats for plants and animals, and restore important ecosystem functions and services (Cole et al 2019). Introduction of seeds to restoration sites is crucial for guaranteeing restoration success and ensuring colonization by target species which are locally absent. Seed sowing is especially recommended in large restoration sites in human-. Sowing seeds of rare target species is a widely applied species introduction method in dry grassland restoration projects (Barr et al 2017). The availability of seed material of regional provenance is often a major limiting factor in restoration projects (de Vitis et al 2017), and especially in large-scale projects only a limited number of target species can be included in the seed mixtures (Kiss et al 2020)
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