Heterogeneity promotes resilience in restored prairie: implications for the ‘environmental heterogeneity hypothesis’

Enhancing resilience in formerly degraded ecosystems is an important goal of restoration ecology. However, evidence for the recovery of resilience and its underlying mechanisms requires long-term experiments and comparison to reference ecosystems. We used data from an experimental prairie restoration that featured long-term soil heterogeneity manipulations and data from comparable remnant (reference) prairie to (1) quantify the recovery of ecosystem functioning (i.e., productivity) relative to remnant prairie, (2) compare resilience of restored and remnant prairies to a natural drought, and (3) test whether soil heterogeneity enhances resilience of restored prairie. We compared sensitivity and legacy effects between prairie types (remnant and restored) and among four prairie sites that included two remnant prairie sites and prairie restored under homogeneous and heterogeneous soil conditions. We measured sensitivity and resilience as the proportional change in aboveground net primary pr...,
These data pertain to Figure 1 in Wojciechowski et al. (Ecological Applications).

Grass, forb, and total aboveground net primary productivity (ANPP) were determined for the same time period (2014-2019) using the same methods in remnant and restored prairie experiments. In all experiments, plant material was harvested from 0.1 m2 quadrats at peak biomass. Biomass was sorted into grasses, forbs, and litter produced in the sampling year. All biomass was dried at 60oC and weighed to estimate ANPP (Briggs and Knapp 1991). In the restoration experiment, we harvested biomass from twelve quadrats in each plot (n = 4 per heterogeneity treatment). In REMIRT, ANPP was estimated from six quadrats in each of 6 control plots. In REMBGP, ANPP was estimated from two quadrats in each of 4 control plots. Biomass in each sample was multiplied by 10 to report ANPP values as g/m2/yr. 
, , # Remnant and Restored Prairie ANPP 2014-2019

Remnant and Restored Prairie ANPP 2014-2019

Heterogeneity promotes resilience in restored prairie: implications for the ‘environmental heterogeneity hypothesis’
Ashley A. Wojciechowski, John M. Blair, Scott L. Collins, and Sara G. Baer

Ecological Applications

DATA:

Data are provided in one file (Remnant and Restored Prairie ANPP 2014-2019.csv) corresponding to annual aboveground net primary productivity (ANPP) data of two remnant prairie experiments and one restored prairie experiment located at the Konza Prairie Long Term Ecological Research site in Manhattan, KS. Datafile includes grass (= GRASS in file name), forb (= FORB in file name) and total (=TOTAL in file name) ANPP from 2013 to 2019.

We used a subset of whole plots in the restoration prairie experiment representing the most homogeneous (RESHOM) and most heterogeneous (RESHET) soil treatments for this study. Each whole-plot heterogeneity treatment was assigned to a 6 m x 8 m...