Journal
RESTORATION ECOLOGY
Volume 29, Issue 5, Pages -Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/rec.13374
Keywords
carbon amendments; resource conservative; resource exploitative; resource‐ use efficiency; restoration; soil nutrient availability; tropical ecosystems
Categories
Funding
- Department of Defense Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program [RC-2433]
- USDA Forest Service Institute of Pacific Islands Forestry
- College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa via the USDA-NIFA Hatch program [HAW01127H, HAW01123M]
- College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa via USDA-NIFA McIntire-Stennis program [HAW01127H, HAW01123M]
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In a greenhouse experiment evaluating woody native and invasive species from Hawaiian wet and dry tropical ecosystems, it was found that resource conservative native species performed better under soil nutrient conditions, highlighting the potential of manipulating soil nutrient availability as a restoration tool for woody species in tropical ecosystems.
Non-native invasive plants often outcompete native species under high resource availability. Restoration techniques that lower resources may, therefore, create favorable conditions for resource conservative native species over resource exploitative invasive species. Research on this topic has focused on temperate grass and forb-dominated ecosystems and has rarely been tested for woody species or tropical vegetation. We evaluated growth, resource-use efficiency (RUE), ecophysiology, and competition (i.e. a relative interaction index based on biomass) of four woody native and two dominant invasive species from Hawaiian wet and dry tropical ecosystems in a greenhouse experiment. Density of plants was constant and species were grown with either a conspecific or the invasive species from that ecosystem type across a gradient of soil nutrient availability. Instantaneous photosynthetic rates varied minimally across nutrient availability. However, both invasive and one native species increased leaf area as nutrients increased, providing more photosynthetic area and increasing total biomass. Nitrogen RUE decreased with increasing nutrient availability for all but one native species, while phosphorus RUE remained constant for all but one native species. Competitive interactions were weak, variable, and not significantly impacted by soil nutrients. Overall, plants categorized as invasive or resource exploitative had larger changes in response variables with increasing soil nutrients compared to those categorized as native or resource conservative. These results suggest that manipulating soil nutrient availability is a potentially viable restoration tool for at least some woody species in tropical ecosystems. However, predicting restoration success requires understanding species-specific ecophysiological traits determining response to altered environmental conditions.
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