CRB: Vole-driven Change in Tallgrass Dominance

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Howe0129081Experimental restoration uses land reclamation techniques to test fundamental ecological theory and thereby inform management practices. This work will maintain an existing example of a grassland restoration to (1) monitor vole-driven changes in plant dominance over enough time to distinguish among several possible outcomes; (2) determine whether initial changes in standing crop are persistent or transient, and (3) determine whether vole-driven effects produce persistent increases or decreases in plant richness and diversity. Initial results to date raise the following issues: (1) Will the established vole-driven change in plant dominance result in the promotion of a new single dominant species? (2) Will initial reductions in apparent aboveground productivity persist? (3) Will vole-driven changes increase or decrease diversity? If voles effectively replace a palatable grass with a distasteful single large dicot species, such as Rudbeckia, community aspect will change but apparent productivity and diversity may not. If smaller clonal dicots become co-dominants aspect will change, standing crop will decline, and plant diversity may increase. The outcomes of these questions are compelling for understanding the origins and maintenance of tallgrass communities because they would not simply be incremental changes in relative abundance of species. Within the limits of the experimental set of species, they could amount to rodent-driven changes in fundamental properties of the communities. This is a known and understood possibility for ungulate effects on tallgrass communities, but the potential for rodents to have effects of similar magnitude is not widely recognized.