Large-scale restoration of species-rich dry grasslands on arable land: Environmental filtering drives successful species establishment over a period of 10 years

Sowing of regionally specific seed mixtures on former arable land is increasingly used to restore species-rich grasslands, but it often faces important obstacles in environmental conditions and colonisation from preserved surrounding grasslands. Long-term landscape scale studies, which explore the processes governing plant establishment from seed mixtures and later colonisation from the surrounding landscape are scarce. We studied the species and functional trait composition of 32 grasslands restored 1–11 years before the first sampling by sowing regional seed mixtures in the White Carpathian Mts (SE Czech Republic). We compared them with 23 well-preserved permanent grasslands in their surroundings. In each grassland we estimated plant species cover in three plots of 25 m2, in restored grasslands in 2009, 2014 and 2019, in permanent grasslands in 2009. The species composition of the restored grasslands converged towards the permanent grasslands due to expansion of dry grassland species ..., We repeatedly sampled (2009, 2014, and 2019) 32 grasslands restored on former arable land and compared them with 23 well preserved reference of permanent grasslands (sampled in 2009). Grasslands (localities) were restored 1–11 years (age) before the first sampling by sowing regional seed mixtures in the White Carpathian Mts (SE Czech Republic). We analyzed species composition of grassland communities, and the sown seed mixture by ordinations and we classified them into following groups:
Sown dry grassland species, Sown mesic grassland species, Unsown dry grassland species, Unsown mesic grassland species, Weedy species, Other species.
We analyzed cover and number of species within those groups.
We further analyzed functional trait composition by computing community weighted means of traits (CWM). The used traits were:
Canopy height – height of the highest photosynthetic tissue in m.
Seed mass – weight of one seed in mg.
SLA – specific leaf area in m2/kg
LDMC – leaf dry matter content in ..., First cell of each sheet contains brief data description as comment. Variable names are kept as described in the manuscript (Mudrák et al., DOI: 10.1111/1365-2664.14456).
Missing data are marked as \"NA\".