Ecosystem state assessment after more than 100 years since planting for dune consolidation
Author(s)
Date Issued
2021
Type
article
Volume
29
Issue
7
Start Page
1
End Page
10
Journal
Abstract
The assessment of the ecosystem state is fundamental to understand the success of ecological rehabilitation, especially in the long term.We aimto evaluate the rehabilitation success of a uniqueMediterranean dune system site along the Tyrrhenian coast of Italy which underwent a dune consolidation intervention and species planting at the beginning of the twentieth century after the destruction of the natural ecosystem.We used three nearby non-rehabilitated protected coastal sites with different degrees of disturbance as reference sites encompassing different potential rehabilitation outcomes of the target site. To assess the overall result of the intervention, we used several plant characteristics and measured taxonomic and functional beta-diversity between all sites.
We compared the proportions of typical and ruderal species of dune habitat types across sites. We further used the species–area relationship to examine if the number of observed species in our sites differed from the expected. Our analyses revealed that the rehabilitated site was taxonomically and functionally more similar to the least disturbed site.We suggest that plant characteristics arising from botanical inventories can be fruitfully used in rehabilitation assessment as they value the taxonomic and functional species diversity at the community scale.Weconclude that plant characteristics compared across sites are useful tools in ecosystem state assessment if they reflect the ecological functions and conservation values of the natural ecosystems.
Additional information
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution
License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the
original work is properly cited.
Supporting information at:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/rec.13435/suppinfo
License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the
original work is properly cited.
Supporting information at:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/rec.13435/suppinfo