Identifying reference communities in ecological restoration: the use of environmental conditions driving vegetation composition
Aure Durbecq, Renaud Jaunatre, Élise Buisson, Alexandre Cluchier, Armin Bischoff
Abstract
In restoration ecology, the reference ecosystem represents a key concept which is well defined from a theoretical point of view. In practice, however, selecting reference systems, such as reference plant communities, often lacks clear methodology. In order to facilitate this selection, we provide a framework based on ecological theory, and more precisely on relationships between vegetation and environmental factors, to identify reference plant communities. The four major steps are: (1) the delimitation of a geographical zone in which habitat types similar to restoration sites occur; (2) the identification of environmental factors structuring non‐degraded plant communities within this geographical zone; (3) the comparison of the environmental factors between non‐degraded and degraded sites; and (4) the selection of the non‐degraded sites most similar to restoration sites in terms of environmental factors to use them as references. We concept‐proved our approach by identifying reference communities using environmental factor combinations for five mountain grassland sites degraded by the construction of a high‐voltage line. In a multivariate analysis of 18 non‐degraded sites, we identified six major environmental factors explaining plant species compositions. A second multivariate analysis including degraded sites provided environmental distances of the 18 non‐degraded to each of the degraded sites. The results demonstrated that the environmentally most similar sites were not necessarily the geographically closest ones. In conclusion, the analysis of regional plant–environment interactions provides an important tool to identify reference communities or source sites for seed transfer if not available adjacent to degraded habitats.