Removing invasive giant reed reshapes desert riparian butterfly and bird communities

Giant reed (Arundo donax) is a prevalent invasive plant in desert riparian ecosystems that threatens wildlife habitat. From 2008 to 2018, under a United States–Mexico partnership, prescribed burns and herbicide applications were used to remove giant reed and promote native revegetation along the Rio Grande – Río Bravo floodplain in west Texas, USA, and Mexico. Our goal was to explore the effects of the removal efforts on butterfly and bird communities and their habitat along the United States portion of the Rio Grande – Río Bravo floodplain in Big Bend National Park, Texas. During spring and summer, 2016–2017, we surveyed butterflies, birds, and their habitat using ground-collected and remotely sensed data. Using a variety of generalized linear and N-mixture modeling routines and multivariate analyses, we found that the initial giant reed removal efforts removed key components of riparian habitat leading to reduced butterfly and bird communities. Within several years following managemen..., Sampling design
We used a space-for-time sampling design, sampling within the available floodplain area to capture conditions in unburned locations with and without giant reed and burned locations at different times since the last burn. We identified 167 sites distributed throughout the Rio Grande floodplain in BIBE, ranging from Santa Elena Canyon in the western portion of the park to Boquillas Canyon in the east. We used the following criteria to assign sites into 4 management groups, which we used for the basis of our analyses. We used the group recent (n = 21) for sites burned ≤3 years before sampling. These were characterized by bare ground, sparse vegetation, and some resprouting giant reed. The group older (n = 19) described sites burned ≥4 years before sampling. These were characterized by the regrowth of riparian vegetation and some resprouting giant reed. We used the group unburned floodplain (n = 16) for unburned, non-forest sites without significant giant reed cover (<3% ..., We used R for all data analyses. We have attached R files, with code, adjoining the datasets used for analyses related to our objectives.
R Core Team. 2017. R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. URL https://www.R-project.org/.