Plant community responses to grassland restoration efforts across a large-scale precipitation gradient

Identifying how plant species diversity varies across environmental gradients remains a controversial topic in plant community ecology because of complex interactions among putative factors. This is especially true for grasslands where habitat loss has limited opportunities for systematic study across broad spatial scales. Here we overcome these limitations by examining restored plant community responses to a large-scale precipitation gradient under two common Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) restoration approaches. The two restoration strategies examined were CP2, which seeds a relatively low number of species, and CP25, which seeds a higher number of species. We sampled plant communities on 55 CRP fields distributed along a broad precipitation gradient (410-1,170 mm mean annual precipitation) spanning 650 km within the grassland biome of North America. Mean annual precipitation (MAP) was the most important predicator of plant species richness and had a positive, linear response across the gradient. To a lesser degree, restoration practices also played a role in determining community diversity. The linear increase in species richness across the precipitation gradient reflects the species pool increase from short to tallgrass prairie communities and explained most of the richness variation. These findings provide insight into the diversity constraints and fundamental drivers of change across a large-scale gradient representing a wide variety of grassland habitats. Across a broad environmental gradient, initial planting differences between restoration practices had lower effects on plant diversity than expected. This suggests that new strategies are needed to effectively establish diverse plant communities on large-scale restorations such as these.