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Seedling Submergence Tolerances Accurately Predict Riparian Tree Species Distributions: Insights to Help Design Environmental Flows

  • Physical and Biotic Drivers of Change in Riparian Ecosystems
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Abstract

Quantification of flooding thresholds that govern species distributions on microtopographic gradients in floodplains can help design environmental flows, but the multiple correlated dimensions of flooding such as frequency, depth, duration, and timing are a challenge. We postulated that species distributions are limited by the most stressful combination of flooding dimensions when the plants are in their most susceptible developmental stage. To test this idea, we measured survival of young seedlings in pots subjected to flood treatments that completely submerged the seedlings in stagnant water with and without suspended sediments for durations of up to 6 weeks during the growing season. This measure of flood tolerance predicted floodplain distributional limits of 16 tree species with high accuracy (adj. r2 = 0.91). The strength of the result suggests that seedling ability to survive complete submergence in stagnant water for prolonged periods is an important mechanism limiting species distributions in riparian forests. We propose that environmental flows that completely submerge the seedling layer in floodplain forest with stagnant water for at least 3 weeks are likely to be more effective at eliminating invading upland species than flows that only flood the soil up to the root collars of seedlings.

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Acknowledgements

Stewart Rood, Martha Hoopes, Amy Frary and Timothy Farnham and three anonymous reviewers provided helpful comments for the project and on earlier drafts of the manuscript. We are grateful to the US Fish & Wildlife Service for permitting us to implement this experiment at the Richard Cronin Aquatic Resource Center as well as to the Center’s staff and its director, David Perkins. Wayne Woodward at TNC and summer research assistants Olivia Williams, Katie Sperry, Cynthia Faith, and Holly Banford were a great help implementing the experiments.

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  1. The Nature Conservancy, Northampton, MA, 01060, USA

    Christian O. Marks

  2. Department of Environmental Conservation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, 01003, USA

    Christian O. Marks

  3. Department of Biological Sciences, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA, 01075, USA

    Hanna Atia

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Marks, C.O., Atia, H. Seedling Submergence Tolerances Accurately Predict Riparian Tree Species Distributions: Insights to Help Design Environmental Flows. Wetlands 40, 1923–1934 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13157-020-01375-5

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