PARENT SESSION
Thursday, August 10, 5:00-6:30 pm
Poster Session 20 - Biodiversity
Exhibit Hall, Ballroom Level, Cook Convention Center
Covariation in plant abundance and diversity estimators in an old field herbaceous plant community.
LaJeunesse, Katherine *,1, Stevens, M. Henry 1, 1 Miami University, Oxford, OH, USA
ABSTRACT- Aboveground plant biomass is a valuable source of data in many ecological and rangeland studies, but its destructive nature limits the usefulness of biomass in long-term studies or in areas protected for conservation purposes. Here we compare non-destructive methods that could be or have been used as surrogates of species aboveground biomass and of total aboveground biomass. For each species, we measured the correlation between aboveground biomass, and both frequency and percent cover in each plot. For total vegetation, we measured the correlation between total above ground biomass and Leaf Area Index (LAI), transmittance of light through the canopy, total additive frequency, and total additive percent cover of each plot. We found that the percent cover of each species was more often highly correlated with the biomass of each species than was species frequency. The LAI of the vegetation was more highly correlated with total aboveground biomass than was any other biomass surrogate. We conducted a case study to determine whether the biomass surrogates would display the same trends as biomass when substituted into diversity-biomass and richness-biomass correlations. As expected, the methods that had been found to be most closely correlated with biomass, percent cover within species and LAI among species, also resulted in diversity correlations and richness correlations similar to those correlations with biomass. With further study, this information should be considered in future studies measuring plant abundances, as well as in reevaluating past studies that utilized these methods.
Key words: aboveground plant biomass surrogates, diversity-biomass and richness-biomass relationships, herbaceous plants in old field habitat