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Direct and Indirect Effects of Climate Change in Coastal Wetlands: Will Climate Change Influence Wetlands by Affecting Plant Invasion?

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Abstract

Introduced species and climate change can have direct impacts on wetland communities, but they can also produce indirect effects such that climate change (i.e., effects of flooding and salinity) can affect native plants by exacerbating or reducing invasion. We assessed the direct and indirect effects of flooding, salinity, and introduced species on wetland communities across a salinity gradient by analyzing existing monitoring data from over 390 Coastwide Reference and Monitoring Sites (CRMS) using path analysis. As expected, we found that introduced species cover and richness was highest in fresh marshes and decreased across the salinity gradient. In fresh marshes, introduced cover and salinity separately negatively affected native cover and richness, but there were no indirect effects. In intermediate marshes, introduced cover and salinity reduced native cover and richness, and indirect effects were weakly positive because salinity negatively affected introduced cover. In brackish and saline marshes increasing salinity and flooding reduced native cover and richness. Our results suggest that climate change will negatively affect all wetland plant communities, and invasion will negatively affect fresher wetlands; however, climate change will not exacerbate invasions in wetlands and could reduce introduced species effects.

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Data Availability

Data are available in the Mendeley Data Digital Repository, https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/tpz77s9c58/1 (Birnbaum et al., 2021)

Code Availability

Code is available in the GitHub Digital Repository, https://github.com/PWaryszak/CRMS

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank CRMS for making the data publicly available and Farrer lab at Tulane University for fruitful discussions that improved the development of the concepts in the manuscript.

Funding

Funding was provided by the Louisiana State Board of Regents grant LEQSF(2017-20)-RD-A-14 to ECF.

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  1. Christina Birnbaum and Pawel Waryszak contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, School of Science and Engineering, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, 70118, USA

    Christina Birnbaum, Pawel Waryszak & Emily C. Farrer

  2. Centre for Integrative Ecology, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, Faculty of Science & Built Environment, Deakin University, 221 Burwood Highway, 3125, Burwood, Victoria, Australia

    Christina Birnbaum & Pawel Waryszak

  3. Applied Chemistry and Environmental Science, School of Science, RMIT University, 3001, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Christina Birnbaum

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Contributions

Conceptualization: CB, ECF and PW; Methodology: CB, ECF and PW; Formal analysis and investigation: PW, ECF and CB; Writing - original draft preparation: CB; Writing - review and editing: CB, PW and ECF; Funding acquisition: ECF. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Christina Birnbaum.

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Birnbaum, C., Waryszak, P. & Farrer, E.C. Direct and Indirect Effects of Climate Change in Coastal Wetlands: Will Climate Change Influence Wetlands by Affecting Plant Invasion?. Wetlands 41, 59 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13157-021-01456-z

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