Achievement Unlocked
It’s been two years since we sowed wiregrass seeds for our experimental restoration project.
My, how our field has grown! The photos below show how much the wiregrass field has changed over two years!
What an adventure it has been! We wrapped up our active research in the wiregrass field after sampling in the fall of 2023. Because we have a few upcoming papers on our findings, it will be helpful to show how we set up our sampling plots.
Before we sowed seeds in March of 2022, we asked Rick Robbins, a retired USGS soil scientist, to help us survey the soils in our project area. Past research suggests that wiregrass plants have better survival and growth when planted in soils similar to those of the parent plants. Because we were sowing seeds from dry and wet sites, we wanted to test the effects of sowing seeds in similar and different soils. We identified areas where the water table was less than 30 cm below the soil surface as our wet soils and areas where the water table was deeper as our dry soils. More details on the soils at our site will be in our publication, which we will link as soon as it is officially published!
We knew that in addition to two different seed and soil types, we wanted to investigate the effects of seeding rates and competition with regrowing vegetation. See this post for our decision on three seeding rates.
This led us to an unheard-of achievement in ecology: a Latin square design!
We laid out 16 Latin squares: 4 for each combination of seed and soil type. Each Latin square was further divided into 16 smaller plots: 4 plots for each of the seeding rates, and 4 additional plots at the lowest seeding rate that were weeded to remove competition.
The photo to the left shows 16 plots in one Latin square in the field: four plots down and four across. The orange flags marked the midpoints of the long sides of each plot to help us keep track. Each row and column had one of the four treatments, Sudoku-style!
Thanks to the hard work of everyone involved, we’ve gathered a lot of data on how competition, seeding rates, ecotypes, and soil affects wiregrass during the first two years of restoration. We have just published our findings (Link forthcoming) on how regrowing vegetation affects newly establishing wiregrass plants in the first year.
The bottom line? Competition does affect growth and flowering, but not necessarily in a “bad” way. In the photo to the right, we show a weeded plot in the foreground with an unweeded plot in the background. Plants grew larger and more plants flowered in the weeded plots, but plants still established, grew, and flowered in the unweeded plots. And this was only after one year. The flowering was interesting because the field wasn’t burned until July of 2023, and wiregrass typically flowers only after fire.
