Groundcover Restoration in Forests of the Southeastern United States

Chapter 2: Implementing a Restoration Projectrestoration project, the true measure of restoration successis sustained production of the introduced species (Gordon1994). For this reason, monitoring over a short term is notnearly as telling as monitoring over a longer term.Once your monitoring protocol is in place, the next decisioninvolves development of a timeframe for monitoring. Formany vegetation monitoring protocols, the time of the yearwill influence which species are present and the percentcover that they achieve. For this reason, most monitoring isdone during the growing season. In contrast, many rare orinvasive species are most easily identified when in flower orfruit, and monitoring for these species should be done at thetime most conducive to their identification. In addition toseasonal affects, monitoring should be repeated at intervalsthat are useful to the restoration goals. For example, if seedshave just been introduced to the site, monitoring shouldoccur regularly at short intervals if the goal is to determinegermination percentages. In contrast, when monitoring thesurvival of outplantings, the first month will show the mostchange and then bi-annual or yearly monitoring shouldsuffice unless an unexpected climatic event (e.g., droughtor hurricane) has occurred or a restoration activity (e.g.,prescribed fire or herbicide) has been introduced intothe site. In conclusion, the timeline for monitoring musttake into account the biology of the species of interest andmust gather the data needed to make informed decisionsregarding the need to change management strategies.Finally, the goal of monitoring is to be able to understandhow a restoration activity affects plant community presence,composition, and/or structure. When choosing monitoringprotocols, it is important to understand what types ofdata analysis will be necessary to make the data collectedunderstandable and useful. For species presence/absencedata this can be as simple as a list of native species foundor a graph of the number of native species through time.For quantitative data on density or cover, graphs of changesover time can be employed. If different restoration activitieshave been conducted within the site, the responses amongplots can be compared statistically using a t-test or ANOVA.Finally, when rare species are monitored or when havingpredictive power of the future health or status of populationsis of interest, an analysis of demographic data using matrixmodels should be employed (Caswell 2006; Maschinski andDuquesnel 2006).The Society of Ecological Restoration International (SER)developed a Primer that recommends 9 ecosystem attributesworthy of consideration when assessing if restoration effortshave been successful (SER 2004). These attributes can belumped into 3 categories: vegetative diversity, vegetativestructure, and ecological processes. Time invested in carefulconsideration of exactly which of these characteristics ismost appropriate for defining success in a particular projectbefore work is initiated will be time well spent.| 25 |