Simulated Photovoltaic Solar Panels Alter the Seed Bank Survival of Two Desert Annual Plant Species.

Rebecca R Hernandez,Sophia Haji,Kara A Moore-O’Leary,Karen E Tanner,Bruce M Pavlik,Ingrid M Parker

doi:10.3390/plants9091125

Abstract

Seed bank survival underpins plant population persistence but studies on seed bank trait-environment interactions are few. Changes in environmental conditions relevant to seed banks occur in desert ecosystems owing to solar energy development. We developed a conceptual model of seed bank survival to complement methodologies using in-situ seed bank packets. Using this framework, we quantified the seed bank survival of two closely related annual desert plant species, one rare (Eriophyllum mohavense) and one common (Eriophyllum wallacei), and the seed bank–environment interactions of these two species in the Mojave Desert within a system that emulates microhabitat variation associated with solar energy development. We tracked 4860 seeds buried across 540 seed packets and found, averaged across both species, that seed bank survival was 21% and 6% for the first and second growing seasons, respectively. After two growing seasons, the rare annual had a significantly greater seed bank survival (10%) than the common annual (2%). Seed bank survival across both species was significantly greater in shade (10%) microhabitats compared to runoff (5%) and control microhabitats (3%). Our study proffers insight into this early life-stage across rare and common congeners and their environmental interactions using a novel conceptual framework for seed bank survival.

Highlights

Understanding seed banks has proven to be exceptionally challenging, rendering our knowledge of early life history traits incomplete across the plant kingdom [1,2]
We present a conceptual model of seed bank survival (Figure 2c) to provide a framework to quantify and compare seed bank data from seed bank packets across various environments and through time
After deploying and collecting seeds from a seed bank packet, we visually evaluated seeds to differentiate between decayed seed with split seed coats and no radicle, and germinated seed, with radicles or other plant tissue present

Summary

Introduction

Understanding seed banks has proven to be exceptionally challenging, rendering our knowledge of early life history traits incomplete across the plant kingdom [1,2]. Studies of seed banks of rare and common species in desert annual plant communities may aid an understanding of seed bank traits. Desert annual plants are an established model system for seed bank studies: their aboveground life cycle stages are exceptionally fast, they are mostly surficial in the soil (≤2 cm depth), and their responses to changes in the environment often occur over short durations of time [8,22,23,24,25,26]

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