Salinity and inundation effects on productivity of brackish tidal marsh plants in the San Francisco Bay-Delta Estuary
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PRIMARY RESEARCH PAPER
Salinity and inundation effects on productivity of brackish tidal marsh plants in the San Francisco Bay-Delta Estuary Christopher N. Janousek Karen M. Thorne
. Bruce D. Dugger . Brandon M. Drucker .
Received: 8 December 2019 / Revised: 15 September 2020 / Accepted: 19 September 2020 / Published online: 29 October 2020 Ó Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract Plant productivity is central to numerous ecosystem functions in tidal wetlands. We examined how productivity of brackish marsh plants in northern California responded to abiotic stress gradients of inundation and salinity using two experimental approaches. In a greenhouse study with varying salinity, shoot production and biomass of Juncus balticus, Schoenoplectus acutus and S. americanus all declined monotonically with higher salinity, with evidence of differences in sensitivity among species by their varied functional responses. Salinity also negatively affected fecundity for the one species (S. americanus) that produced enough inflorescences during the experiment for analysis. In a field manipulation of inundation and initial pore water salinity, total end-of-season biomass and other metrics of
growth in the high marsh species, J. balticus, had unimodal relationships with inundation. Root production tended to be greater strongly impacted by greater inundation than shoot production. The salinity treatment quickly dissipated for treatments that were flooded more frequently but persisted at a higher marsh elevation where it suppressed plant growth. These results suggest that both increased flooding and salinity associated with climate change and sea-level rise may negatively impact productivity of brackish marsh species, but with variable effects by species and stressor.
Handling editor: Glenn Guntenspergen
Introduction
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10750-020-04419-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
As foundation species, plants play a central role in several important ecosystem functions in emergent tidal wetlands. Vascular plants are the basis for many valued wetland ecosystem services including carbon sequestration (Mcleod et al., 2011), flood protection (Shepard et al., 2011; Narayan et al., 2017), and support of fish and wildlife populations (Spautz et al., 2006; Whitfield, 2017). Carbon fixed by estuarine plants and algae provides trophic support for a diverse array of consumers through herbivory or detrital pathways (Page, 1997; Levin et al., 2006). Above-
C. N. Janousek (&) B. D. Dugger B. M. Drucker Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, Oregon State University, 104 Nash Hall, Corvallis, OR 97331, USA e-mail: [email protected] K. M. Thorne U.S. Geological Survey, Western Ecological Research Center, One Shields Ave, Davis, CA 95616, USA
Keywords Biomass Climate change Plant growth Sea-level rise Suisun Bay
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