Efficacy of strip seeding to restore grassland plant communities

Abstract

Strip seeding is a novel restoration practice of strategically planting in strips, resulting in alternating seeded and unseeded areas to target efforts and reduce costs while achieving ecological outcomes similar to conventional methods of seeding entire sites. However, there has been limited work testing the efficacy of this method, including how strip width and percent seeded area affect restoration outcomes. We evaluated four native grass strip seed treatments (33%, 50% narrow, 50% wide, and 66% of area seeded), an unseeded control, and a conventional 100% seeded control to investigate: (1) how plant communities in seeded and unseeded strips change over time; (2) how initial strip width affect native species biomass, invasive species biomass, and plant species diversity; and (3) cost‐effectiveness of strip seeding in terms of management costs and benefits accrued. Four years post‐seeding, seeded and unseeded strips exhibited unique plant communities; seeded strips were characterized by native perennial grasses while unseeded strips had a higher abundance of annual forbs (majority non‐native) and non‐native annual grasses. Plant communities were similar within strips across strip seeding treatments. Invasion resistance and productivity scaled with percent area initially seeded, but by year four all strip seed treatments (33–66%) provided similar benefits to conventional seeding (100%). Overall, this suggests strip seeding is a promising, cost‐effective method to restore targeted species and maintain native grassland communities. Further research is needed on long‐term effects, ecological and economic barriers and opportunities, and provisioning of a broad suite of ecosystem services across different environmental contexts and management practices.