Restoring biopedturbation in grasslands with anthropogenic focal disturbance

Abstract

Grassland ecosystems evolved with natural disturbance events on multiple spatial scales in which focal, fine-scale soil disturbance by animals often was imbedded within large-scale grazing disturbance. The resulting plant communities adapted to both broad-scale and fine-scale disturbance that resulted in species-rich plant communities. These natural disturbance regimes have been largely replaced by anthropogenic disturbance. While we generally understand grassland response to modern grazing practices, we know much less about plant community response to soil disturbance imbedded within non-focal grazing. Therefore, we used a tracked vehicle to focally disturb soil in a North American mesic mixed prairie that was either undisturbed prairie or prairie with a recent history of disturbance from either grazing or haying. Successional trajectory and recovery time following focal soil disturbance was similar between grazed and hayed plant communities. Species composition did not differ (P 0.05) focal soil disturbance alone. Also, the effect of focal soil disturbance was shortlived with recovery in two growing seasons. Our results suggest that anthropogenic focal soil disturbance is a reasonable mechanism to restore soil disturbance to the grassland ecosystem.