Abstract
The experimental study of the ecology of natural plant communities is necessary to demonstrate the effects of environmental factors on plant growth. It allows one to make predictions of the likely effects of environmental changes on plant communities. Manipulating an entire ecosystem is complicated, and is rarely attempted. An alternative method is applied here for the submerged plant communities of the seasonally-flooded oligohaline marshes of the Camargue. It consists of collecting undisturbed sediment samples with their contained intact seed bank, and submitting them to different salinities. The study of total biomass and of the biomass of the more frequent species was carried out using parametric tests. The precision of the results depended on the frequency of the species in the replicates. When the frequency was low, non-parametric statistics were necessary. The method seems to be particularly suitable for the study of communities of annual species in aquatic environments.
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