|
|
-
Grassland diversity
Brian Wilsey hopes a Faculty Development Grant will help discover
if species evenness is important in grassland diversity
- Brian Wilsey is well on his way to looking at a good portion of those
grasslands.
The assistant professor of botany has studied grasslands from Argentina
to the Serengeti, and from Yellowstone to Texas.
"I'm interested in grasslands all over the world," he said. "Most
native grasslands, including the tall grass prairies that used to be in
this part of the country, are pretty much gone.
"There is a lot of interest however in restoring these grasslands and
how we go about doing just that."
Wilsey hopes a Faculty Development Grant (FDG) from the College of Liberal
Arts and Sciences will help in that effort. Wilsey has received a $3,000
FDG for his project "Plant Diversity and Grassland Productivity: Is
Species Evenness Important?"
LAS awards several Faculty Development Grants each year. The purpose of
these grants is to provide "seed" money to begin research or scholarship
that is expected to continue developing and to attract funding from other
sources beyond the period covered by the "seed" funding.
In his project, Wilsey will conduct experiments at three locations in the
U.S. Two experiments will be in Iowa - one at the Neil Smith National Wildlife
Refuge near Prairie City and another at Iowa State’s Western Research
Farm near Castena, Iowa, near Loess Hills in western Iowa. He will also
continue to sample an ongoing experiment in the Blackland Prairie region
of Texas.
"The goal of this project is to test the hypothesis that reductions
in plant biodiversity leads to lower stability and rates of ecosystem processes
in grasslands," Wilsey said. "Few studies have been conducted
to test this hypothesis and all of them experimentally varied species richness
or the number of species in a given area."
Wilsey will vary another equally important component of diversity, which
is evenness. That is a measure of how well distributed abundance or biomass
is among species in a community.
"By varying species evenness rather than richness, a more direct test
of the hypothesis can be made because diversity is not confounded with species
identity," he said.
Wilsey says that reductions in grassland diversity usually occur when ecosystems
are fragmented or placed under environmental stress, or when introduced
species become dominant.
In two of his experiments, Wilsey plans on planting perennial grassland
plants with different diversities in square meter plots. He will allow the
plots to grow for a year and then will measure primary productivity, soil
water availability, canopy light capture and invasion by weedy plants into
the grassland plots.
Evenness of plant communities will be experimentally varied in the plots
by changing dominance of different plant species. Evenness will also be
sampled in grasslands that have been and have not been grazed by bison at
the Neal Smith NWR. Enclosures will be erected to experimentally exclude
the bison.
"I'm particularly interested in how plants, and plant communities,
respond when they are eaten by animals," he said.
Wilsey has studied grazing and grasslands since his days in the Serengeti,
where over two million animals graze in a relatively small area.
"I think the diversity issue is really important in regards to how
grasslands respond not only to grazing, but with other changes in their
environment as well," he said.
Around LAS
February 10-23, 2003
|
|
