Predicting drought tolerance from slope aspect preference in restored plant communities

Plants employ strategies of tolerance, endurance, and avoidance to cope witharidity in space and time, yet understanding the differential importance of suchstrategies in determining patterns of abundance across a heterogeneous landscapeis a challenge. Are the species abundant in drier microhabitats also better able tosurvive drought? Are there relationships among occupied sites and temporaldynamics that derive from physiological capacities to cope with stress or dormancyduring unfavorable periods? We used a restoration project conducted on twoslope aspects in a subwatershed to test whether species that were more abundanton more water-limited S-facing slopes were also better able to survive an extremedrought. The attempt to place many species uniformly on different slope aspectsprovided an excellent opportunity to test questions of growth strategy, nichepreference, and temporal dynamics. Perennial species that established and grewbest on S-facing slopes also had greater increases in cove...