EAGER: The ecosystem consequences of management disturbances: examining the community-trait-function relationships of consumers in a restored grassland

Northern Illinois University, Dekalb IL

Investigators

Abstract

Ecosystems carry out a wide range of processes, including services that benefit people such as providing clean air, water, pollination of crops, and productive soils. These processes depend on diverse communities of plants, animals, and other organisms with a wide variety of traits - characteristics of plants and animals that shape how they interact in ecosystems. Human activities that shift communities, such as ecosystem degradation and restoration, have the potential to alter ecosystem processes. This project will examine how management actions in a restored grassland shape the species and trait compositions of plant and animal communities and the ecosystem processes that these species drive. Results will provide guidance on how land managers can maximize the benefits of ecosystems to nature and to society. Collaborations with the research site managers will allow education and outreach opportunities to members of the public who visit the site, including class field trips, and the project will train both graduate and undergraduate students in the practice and communication of science. This project will examine the community and ecosystem function consequences of changes in environmental context resulting from three landscape-scale management actions: reintroduction of megaherbivore grazers (bison), large predator removal, and application of prescribed fires in restored tallgrass prairies. It will advance knowledge of community-trait-function relationships by including consumers in interactions spanning entire food webs and expanding to a relevant landscape scale. Researchers will measure both traits and ecosystem function changes resulting from management actions in two food web modules. The first module includes plants and herbivores (insect and small mammal) and their impacts on primary productivity and litter decomposition through changes in plant traits and herbivore foraging specialization and the degree to which herbivores use a wide variety of food resources (niche breadth) as measured by stable isotopes. The second module is dung decomposers and their effects on soil processes (carbon and nitrogen cycling and decomposition rates) through changes in morphology, foraging strategies, and phenology. Results will reveal how the trait composition of communities mediates the relationship between environmental context and ecosystem function. Ultimately this research will lay the groundwork for studies manipulating the species- and trait-composition of consumer communities. Further, by performing this work in a restored system and in concert with managers, it helps close the loop between researchers and natural resource managers.