Floristic inventory and quality assessment of Bessey Creek Nature Preserve, Cheboygan County, Michigan, 2011.

Field Biology of PlantsWetlands are habitats that provide critical ecosystem services. As transitional habitats between terrestrial and aquatic environments, wetlands contain plant communities that are typically species rich. One way to measure the composition of plant communities is to inventory the species and conduct a Floristic Quality Assessment (FQA) of the species. Created by Michigan’s Department of Natural Resources (MDNR), the FQA is a tool to evaluate areas that may be of floristic importance and calculate the diversity and species richness of a site. We conducted an FQA of the Bessey Creek Nature Preserve in Cheboygan County, MI, which is owned by the Little Traverse Conservancy (Harbor Springs, MI). The site is located at the mouth of Bessey Creek where it enters Douglas Lake. The preserve contains several plant communities located throughout four habitat zones: the roadside, the swamp, the littoral marsh, and the aquatic shoreline. Our sampling indentified a total of one hundred sixteen species in fifty-four families, with a mean coefficient of conservation of 4.44 for only native species, and 3.62 including introduced species. The preserve has wetlands index of -2.52, signifying that the preserve contains mostly facultative wetland species. Twenty species are considered exotic and are not native to the area. Based on the MDNR’s FQA equations, we calculated the Floristic Quality Index (FQI) of Bessey Creek to be 41.87 when considering only native species and 37.83 when including introduced species. Bessey Creek has a lower FQI than other preserves, ranking below Orchis Fen Preserve (FQI: 49.60) and Kalman Preserve (FQI: 61.70). However, Bessey Creek’s FQI value is above the current threshhold of 35 determined by the MDNR, and is thus considered floristically important to the state of Michigan.Little Traverse Conservancyhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/89421/1/Dorey_VanDyke_Vogt_2011.pd

Anaerobic methanogenesis in wetland ecosystems: do cut emergent aerenchyma of Typha x glauca facilitate increased atmospheric methane emission?

General EcologyAnaerobic methanogensis by bacteria communities is a major source of global atmospheric methane and therefore an important area of concern regarding climate change. This is particularly relevant to wetland ecosystems whose warm, water-logged, oxygen-poor soil conditions are the ideal environment for the fermentation of methane. In addition to relatively slow diffusion of methane through soil and water, and the sudden ebullition of trapped gas pockets, the aerenchyma (vessel-like tubes composed of mostly airspace that transport essential gases throughout the plant) of plants provide a direct route for gases to reach the atmosphere through the aerenchyma. We tested our hypothesis at a wetland site on the coast of Lake Huron in Cheboygan County, MI called Cheboygan Marsh. Five bucket plots pairs were installed where each pair had one bucket with the Typha stems cut below the water (submerged) and the other had stems cut above the water (emerged). Methane emissions were measured from each plot and we concluded that there was a significantly higher methane flux from emergent Typha than submerged Typha.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/89433/1/Green_Dorey_Pedley_Lu_2011.pd

Data from: Patterns of biodiverse, understudied groups do not mirror those of the surrogate groups that set conservation priorities: a case study from the Mid-Atlantic Coastal Plain of eastern North America

We conducted biodiversity inventories of lichens, woody plants, and sedges at 32 sites on the Mid-Atlantic Coastal Plain of eastern North America between November 2012 and June 2015. Each site comprised a single, uniform habitat, and sites were classified as: Coastal Plain Floodplain forest, Coastal Plain Flatwood swamp, Coastal Plain Oak-Pine forest, Maritime forest, Mixed Mesic Hardwood forest, or Tidal forest. We compared alpha diversity and community assemblages of each organismal group across the sites, and compared selected minimal reserve sets in order to visualize biodiversity patterns and assess whether specific components of vascular plants (sedges and woody plants) serve as an effective surrogate for lichens. Woody plants provide a direct substrate for lichen growth, but there was no significant correlation between the alpha diversity of these groups. For conserving maximal species richness among the studied groups, lichens outperformed the sedges and woody plants as the better surrogate group for building minimum reserve sets, even though vascular plants are more commonly used as a surrogate. Likewise, sedge alpha diversity was not correlated with lichens, or with woody plants. Although no group was an effective indicator for high alpha diversity sites of other organisms, a significant correlation between the community assemblages of lichens and woody plants suggests that protecting varied types of plant communities might serve as a workable surrogate for protecting lichens. The lack of congruence between species richness patterns across organismal groups suggests that the mechanisms that shape patterns of diversity are not identical, and that identifying and incorporating specific biodiversity indicators for understudied groups into conservation policy is necessary to ensure their protection

data_packet

This is a zipped folder that contains the following spreadsheets used for analyses in this study: 1) site by species matrices for lichens (1 CSV file) and for vascular plants (1 CSV file). 2) Location data for study sites (1 XLSX file). 3) Georeferenced specimen data used to generate species lists for each site (1 XLSX file)