Applying Plant Strategies in Conservation and Restoration

Abstract

Abstract Conservation biology and ecological restoration are creative and defiant sciences that express optimism in our ability to right the wrongs that humans have inflicted on biodiversity. Plant strategies are integral to successful conservation and restoration. Conservation is the science of rarity and is applied to prevent species and ecological functions from going extinct. Demographic analyses are needed to identify the demographic rates that are most vulnerable to extinction threats. The concept of species rarity has been generalized to the new concept of functional rarity. Traits can be used to generalize across taxa to assess responses to grazing management as well as assess vulnerability of species to global change drivers to inform conservation actions. Restoration is community reassembly because it manipulates abiotic conditions, the species pool, and the density of non-native competitors. Plant strategies inform predictions of community reassembly and the trajectory of community dynamics and ecosystem functioning over time. Traits influence establishment success in response to different environmental conditions and restoration treatments, and they might be useful to inform species selection to optimize restoration outcomes. Plant strategy theory is directly relevant to invasion ecology and assisted migration. Experimental tests of assisted migration in common garden settings to compare demographic rates across environmental gradients could represent some of the strongest tests of plant strategy theory.