Abstract
Hundreds of wetlands comprising thousands of hectares have been restored in the Midwestern United States. In nearly all cases, restoration consisted of simply restoring wetland hydrology. For this reason, the success of these restorations relies on natural colonization. We compared the structure and composition of the vegetation in two types of wetlands: 10 natural wetlands and 17 five-to-seven-year-old restored wetlands. The overall vegetative composition of restored wetlands was different from that of natural wetlands. Restored wetland flora was formed from a subset of species found in natural wetlands. The species restricted to natural wetlands tended to be native perennials and were evenly represented along the elevational gradient. The few species that were restricted to restored wetlands were largely mudflat annuals whose presence is more indicative of the presence of more unvegetated habitat in restored wetlands than of the presence of a distinctive restored wetlands flora. In addition, restored wetlands had lower vegetative cover and species richness than natural wetlands. Both wetland types had similar numbers of exotic species at the whole wetland (4.4 species per wetland) and quadrat scale (1.5 species m2), and dominance of exotics increased with elevation. The lower species richness, greater compositional variability, and lack of a distinctive flora support the hypothesis that dispersal limitation is the primary cause of the differences between the vegetation in restored and natural wetlands.
Similar content being viewed by others
Literature Cited
Batt, B. D. J., M. G. Anderson, and C. D. Anderson. 1989. The use of prairie potholes by North American ducks. p. 204–227 In A. van der Valk (ed.) Northern Prairie Wetlands, 1st Edition. Iowa State University, Ames, IA.
Calely, M. J. and D. Schluter. 1997. The relationship between local and regional diversity. Ecology 78:70–80.
Clements, F. 1916. Plant Succession: an Analysis of the Development of Vegetation. Carnegie Institution, Washington, DC, USA. Publication 242.
Cornell, H. and J. Lawton. 1992. Species interactions, local and regional processes, and limits to the richness of ecological communities: a theoretical approach. Journal of Ecology 61:1–12.
Dobson, A. P., A. D. Bradshaw, and A. J. M. Baker. 1997. Hopes for the future: Restoration ecology and conservation biology. Science 277:515–522.
Drake, J. 1991. Community-assembly mechanics and the structure of and experimental species ensemble. The American Naturalist 137:1–26.
Fairbaim, S. E. and J. J. Dinsmore. 2001. Local and landscape-level influences on wetland bird communities of the Prairie Pothole Region of Iowa, USA. Wetlands 21:41–47.
Findlay, C. S. and J. Houlahan. 1997. Anthropogenic correlates of species richness in southeastern Ontario wetlands. Conservation Biology 11:1000–1009.
Galatowitsch, S. M. 1993. Site selection, design criteria and performance assessment for wetland restorations in the prairie pothole region. Ph.D. Dissertation, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA.
Galatowitsch, S. and A. van der Valk. 1996a. Characteristics of recently restored wetlands in the prairie pothole region. Wetlands 16:75–83.
Galatowitsch, S. and A. van der Valk. 1996b. The vegetation of restored and natural prairie wetlands. Ecological Applications 6: 102–112.
Gleason, H. 1926. The individualistic concept of the plant association. Bulletin of Torrey Botanical Society 53:7–26.
Gleason, H. A. and A. Cronquist. 1991. Manual of Vascular Plants of Northeastern United States and Adjacent Canada, 2nd edition. The New York Botanical Garden, New York, NY, USA.
Godwin, H. 1923. Dispersal of pond flora. Journal of Ecology 11: 160–164.
Grace, J. B. 1987. The impact of preemption on the zonation of two Typha species along lakeshores. Ecological Monographs 57:283–303.
Grubb, P. 1977. The maintenance of species richness in plant communities: the importance of the regeneration niche. Biological Reviews 52:107–145.
Harris, S. and W. Marshall. 1963. Ecology of water-level manipulations on a northern marsh. Ecology 44:331–343.
Inouye, R. S., N. J. Huntly, D. Tilman, J. R. Tester, M. A. Stillwell, and K. C. Zinnel. 1987. Old-field succession on a Minnesota sand plain. Ecology 68:12–26.
Johnstone, I. 1986. Plant invasion windows: a time-based classification of invasion potential. Biological Reviews 61:369–394.
Kemmis, T. J. 1991. Glacial landforms, sedimentology, and depositional environments of the Des Moines lobe, northern Iowa. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA.
Livshits, G., R. R. Sokal, and E. Kobyliansky. 1991. Genetic affinities of Jewish populations. American Journal of Americal Genetics 49:131–146.
McCullagh, P. and J. Nelder. 1989. Generalized Linear Models, 2nd edition. Monographs on Statistics and Applied Probability, vol 37. Chapman and Hall, New York, NY, USA.
McKee, K., I. Mendelssohn, and D. Burdick. 1989. Effects of longterm flooding on root metabolic response in five freshwater marsh plants. Canadian Journal of Botany 67:3446–3452.
Millar, J. 1973. Vegetation changes in shallow marsh wetlands under improving moisture regime. Canadian Journal of Botany 51:1443–1457.
Mitsch, W. J., X. Wu, R. W. Nairn, P. E. Weihe, N. Wang, R. Deal, and C. E. Boucher. 1998. Creating and restoring wetlands. Bioscience 48:1019–1030.
Møller, T. R. and C. P. Rørdam. 1985. Species numbers of vascular plants in relation to area, isolation and age of ponds in Denmark. Oikos 45:8–16.
Naugle, D. E., R. R. Johnson, M. E. Estey, and K. F. Higgins. 2001. A landscape approach to conserving wetland bird habitat in the Prairie Pothole Region of eastern South Dakota. Wetlands 21:1–17.
Neely, R. K. and J. Baker. 1989. Nitrogen and phosphorus dynamics and the fate of agricultural runoff. In A. van der Valk (ed.) Northern Prairie Wetlands, Iowa State University, 1st Edition. Ames, IA, USA.
Pastor, J., A. Downing, and H. E. Erickson. 1996. Species-area curves and diversity-productivity relationships in beaver meadows of Voyageurs National Park, Minnesota, USA. Oikos 77:399–406.
Pielou, E. C. 1984. The Interpretation of Ecological Data: a Primer on Classification and Ordination. Wiley, New York, NY, USA.
Platt, W. J. and I. M. Weiss. 1985. An experimental study of competition among fugitive prairie plants. Ecology 66:708–720.
Robinson, J. V. and J. E. Dickerson. 1987. Does invasion sequence affect community structure? Ecology 68:587–595.
Shurin, J. B., J. E. Havel, M. A. Leibold, and B. Pinel-Alloul. 2000. Local and regional zooplankton species richness: A scale-independent test for saturation. Ecology 81:3062–3073.
Sokal, R. R. and F. J. Rohlf. 1995. Biometry: the Principles and Practice of Statistics in Biological Research, 3rd edition. W.H. Freeman, New York.
Squires, L. and A. van der Valk. 1992. Water-depth tolerances of the dominant emergent macrophytes of the Delta Marsh, Manitoba. Canadian Journal of Botany 70:1860–1867.
Stewart, R. E. and H. A. Kantrud. 1971. Classification of natural ponds in the glaciated prairie region. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Washington, DC, USA. Resource Publication 92.
Tilman, D. 1997. Community invasibility, recruitment limitation, and grassland biodiversity. Ecology 78:81–92.
van der Valk, A. and C. Davis. 1978. The role of seed banks in the vegetation dynamics of prairie glacial marshes. Ecology 59:322–335.
van der Valk, A. and C. Davis. 1980. The impact of a natural drawdown on the growth of four emergent species in a prairie glacial marsh. Aquatic Botany 9:301–322.
van der Valk, A. and C. H. Welling. 1988. The development of zonation in freshwater wetlands: an experimental approach. p. 145–158. In H. During, M. Werger, and J. Willems (eds.) Diversity and Pattern in Plant Communities. Academic Publishing, The Hague, The Netherlands.
van der Valk, A. G., L. Squires, and C. Welling. 1994. Assessing the impacts of an increase in water level on wetland vegetation. Ecological Applications 4:525–534.
Vitousek, P., H. Mooney, J. Lubchenko, and J. Melillo. 1997. Human domination of earth’s ecosystems. Science 277:494–499.
Whittaker, R. 1960. Vegetation of the Siskiyou Mountains, Oregon and California. Ecological Monographs 30:279–338.
Whittaker, R. and W. Niering. 1975. Vegetation of the Santa Catalina Mountains, Arizona. V. biomass, production, and diversity along the elevation gradient. Ecology 56:771–790.
Zedler, J. B. 2000. Progress in wetland restoration ecology. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 15:402–407.
Zobel, M. 1997. The relative role of species pools in determining plant species richness: An alternative explanation of species coexistence? Trends in Ecology and Evolution. 12:266–269.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Seabloom, E.W., van der Valk, A.G. Plant diversity, composition, and invasion of restored and natural prairie pothole wetlands: Implications for restoration. Wetlands 23, 1–12 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1672/0277-5212(2003)023[0001:PDCAIO]2.0.CO;2
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1672/0277-5212(2003)023[0001:PDCAIO]2.0.CO;2