Journal article
Disentangling chronic regeneration failure in endangered woodland ecosystems
Ami Bennett, David H Duncan, Libby Rumpff, Peter A Vesk
ECOSPHERE | WILEY | Published : 2020
DOI: 10.1002/ecs2.2998
Abstract
Ecological restoration of degraded ecosystems requires the facilitation of natural regeneration by plants, often augmented by large-scale active revegetation. The success of such projects is highly variable. Risk factors may be readily identifiable in a general sense, but it is rarely clear how they play out individually, or in combination. We addressed this problem with a field experiment on the survival of, and browsing damage to, 1275 hand-planted buloke (Allocasuarina luehmannii) seedlings in a nationally endangered, semi-arid woodland community. Buloke seedlings were planted in 17 sites representing four landscape contexts and with three levels of protection from kangaroo and lagomorph ..
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Funding Acknowledgements
A. Bennett and D.H. Duncan are joint first authors of this article. This research received funding from the Australian Government's National Environmental Science Program through the Threatened Species Recovery Hub, and Parks Victoria. We are grateful for logistical support from M. Baker (Parks Victoria) and field work assistance from E. Baldwin, L. Riquelme, A. Garza-Garcia, K. Cranney, K. Schoffer, D. White, G. Bennett, S. Suebsanguan, S. Egerton, and S-A. Yap. Our analyses benefited from discussions with N. Golding, and assistance implementing the model in the greta package, and G. Coulson provided helpful comments on the text. This research was conducted under the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning Research Permit No. 10008075.