Assessing biotic communities and the capacity of restored bottomland hardwood forested wetlands to provide multiple ecosystem functions
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The Agricultural Conservation Easement Program, and associated Wetland Reserve Easement (WRE) program were established to restore private marginal agricultural land to wetlands following major wetlands losses throughout the United States. Many WRE projects are focused within the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley to restore floodplain bottomland hardwood (BLH) forests to provide increased wildlife habitat and ecosystem functions, including nitrogen and carbon cycling. We addressed three research questions 1) Do WRE provide avian habitat across the full annual cycle? 2) How do hydrology and restoration age effect aquatic invertebrate and avian communities in restored BLH wetlands?, and 3) To what extent do WRE sites in the LMAV provide multiple ecosystem functions? Avian species richness in winter was uncorrelated with other seasons and species richness was best explained by different environmental variables across seasons, thus, monitoring is needed across seasons if the goal is providing avian habitat across the full annual cycle. Aquatic invertebrate communities were negatively associated with water depth and positively associated with inundation frequency, whereas avian abundance was positively associated with water depth and aquatic invertebrate abundance. Thus, hydrology plays an important role in shaping aquatic invertebrate and avian communities at restored BLH forested wetlands. Lastly, we found no tradeoffs between denitrification potential and biodiversity measures, therefore, BLH wetlands are providing multiple ecosystem functions. Overall, we found that a mosaic of vegetation types within BLH wetlands likely best supports avian species richness across the full annual cycle and maximizes ecosystem function on the landscape while wetland hydrology significantly affects avian and aquatic invertebrate communities.
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Ph. D.