Plant traits of propagule banks and standing vegetation reveal flooding alleviates impacts of agriculture on wetland restoration

1. Restoration of degraded plant communities requires understanding of community assembly processes. Human land use can influence plant community assembly by altering environmental conditions and species’ dispersal patterns. Flooding, including from environmental flows, may counteract land use effects on wetland vegetation. We examined the influence of land use history and flood frequency on the functional composition of wetland plant communities along a regulated river. 2. We applied fourth corner modelling to determine species’ trait-based responses to flooding and land use by combining data on i) the occupancy and abundance of species in propagule banks and standing vegetation, ii) species traits, and iii) environmental conditions of 22 standing vegetation and 108 soil propagule bank study sites. We used analysis of deviance to test how well each dataset characterised trait–environment interactions, and generalised linear models to identify traits related to species’ responses. 3. Th...