Abstract
In the Gulf of Mexico coastal region, prescribed fire has been increasingly used as a management tool to restore declining native ecosystems, but it also increases the threat posed by biological invasion, since the treated sites are more susceptible to invasive species such as Chinese tallow (Triadica sebifera). We chose Mississippi Sandhill Crane National Wildlife Refuge (MSCNWR), a fire-managed landscape, to examine the potential effect of prescribed fire and landscape/community features on tallow invasion and spread. We took a complete survey of roadways and fire lines for tallow and measured a systematic sample of 144 10 × 3 m2 rectangular plots along two selected roadways and a simple random sample of 56 0.04-ha circular plots across burn units. We used pair correlation function for marked point pattern data, zero-inflated negative binomial models for count data, as well as multivariate Hotelling’s T2 test, to analyze the effect of prescribed fire and landscape/community characteristics on tallow invasion and spread along habitat edges and into interiors. Our results show that tallow spread along habitat edges and into interiors in a spatially clustered pattern. Tallow invasion risk decreases with the distance to seed trees and shrub coverage, and with the time since last fire if seed trees are outside the effective seed dispersal range (~300 m), but increases with the time since last fire if seed trees are within the effective seed dispersal range. Tallow seedling (≤2 years old) densities increase with the time since last fire and with increasing overstory tree basal area, but decrease with the distance to seed trees. Tallow-invaded interior plots have significantly shorter mean fire return intervals (2.7 years), lower shrub coverage (8.6%), and are closer to edges (20.3 m) than non-invaded plots (4.3 years, 18.4%, 167.6 m, respectively).
Highlights
In the Gulf of Mexico coastal region, prescribed fire has been recognized as a preferred approach for the restoration of native ecosystems [1]
During the earlier period (2003–2011), tallow was mainly confined to habitat edges encompassing the northwest and west burn units and after 2011 it quickly spread to most habitat edges, encompassing the central burn units (Figure 3B)
Our study examined spatiotemporal spread patterns of Chinese tallow trees in the Mississippi Sandhill Crane National Wildlife Refuge (MSCNWR), a landscape managed intensively using prescribed fire to restore declining native habitats for the endangered Mississippi sandhill crane
Summary
In the Gulf of Mexico coastal region, prescribed fire has been recognized as a preferred approach for the restoration of native ecosystems (e.g., longleaf pine ecosystems, wet pine savannas, and coastal prairies and bogs) [1]. Native to China, tallow is an aggressive invader, able to adapt to a wide variety of ecosystems in the Gulf of Mexico coastal region [9]. Tallow can grow well in a suite of site/soil conditions from sandy to poorly drained to even intermittently flooded, and can tolerate and survive in a variety of light conditions for a long time due to its favorable life history traits (e.g., high specific leaf area, nutrient uptake, seed production, root/stump sprout capacity, and herbivore tolerance) [12,13,14,15,16,17,18].
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