Effects of Lespedeza cuneata invasion on tallgrass prairie plant and arthropod communities
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Effects of Lespedeza cuneata invasion on tallgrass prairie plant and arthropod communities Sofia Varriano . Krishna Patel . Luke Lefler . Carolina Kirksey . Adam Turner . Matthew D. Moran
Received: 9 October 2019 / Accepted: 29 June 2020 Ó Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract We examined effects of the invasive species Lespedeza cuneata on native plants and foliar arthropod communities in a tallgrass prairie. Through observational and manipulative experiments, we examined plant and arthropod responses to L. cuneata over one growing season. The observational study found little impact of the invasive plant on arthropods. By the end of the manipulative experiment, the combined biomass of native grasses and forbs was reduced by approximately 50% in Lespedeza-present plots, while total arthropod numbers were only about 15% lower. Seasonal differences were evident; L. cuneata-absent plots showed lower arthropod numbers in May, but higher abundances in June. Some feeding groups, notably carnivorous arthropods, appeared unaffected by L. cuneata. We tested three hypotheses (one bottom-up and two top-down processes) to explain the relatively weak response of the arthropod community to the invasive plant. Nitrogen content of native plants adjacent to L. cuneata areas was significantly higher compared to plants more
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10530-020-02310-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. S. Varriano K. Patel L. Lefler C. Kirksey A. Turner M. D. Moran (&) Department of Biology, Hendrix College, 1600 Washington Ave., Conway, AR 72032, USA e-mail: [email protected]
distant. Ground arthropod predators were higher during mid-summer in L. cuneata areas, which may partially explain seasonal variation in foliar arthropods. Insectivorous birds were unaffected by L. cuneata abundance, suggesting that arthropod predation rates by birds are unchanged. We suggest that while L. cuneata has strong effects on native plants, its ability to increase neighboring plant quality compensates for the lower biomass of native plants in L. cuneata areas, moderating the arthropod response. While management of this invasive species remains a priority, tallgrass prairie food webs may be partly resistant to L. cuneata invasion. Keywords Arthropods Lespedeza cuneata Sericea Tallgrass prairie
Introduction North American grasslands have been converted or modified by human activity, mostly due to intensive agriculture and other land-use changes (Sampson and Knopf 1994; Samson et al. 2004; Homer et al. 2015), and these threats continue to this day (Allred et al. 2015; Trainor et al. 2016; Moran et al. 2017; Wright et al. 2017; Wimberly et al. 2018; Hendrickson et al. 2019). Because of their large proportional loss, North American grasslands are of particular conservation
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interest and there have been numerous successful attempts to pr
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