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Impacts of drought and native grass competition on buffelgrass (Pennisetum ciliare)

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Abstract

Invasive species are detrimental to ecosystems worldwide, and long-term invasive treatment outcomes are generally poor. Integrating active restoration into an invasive species treatment plan by seeding with species that that can competitively suppress the invader may help to improve treatment outcomes. Buffelgrass is a drought tolerant perennial grass that is highly invasive and disruptive to dryland ecosystem biodiversity across the globe. In this greenhouse experiment, we examine how buffelgrass growth and traits were impacted by the combination of competition with eight native grasses species and water availability. We found that when buffelgrass was grown with species that establish rapidly and have large biomass, buffelgrass tends to exhibit rapid growth, despite becoming more drought stressed. Conversely, when buffelgrass was grown with species that are slow growing and conserve their size under drought conditions, buffelgrass biomass is arrested. The ability to adjust its strategy depending on its neighbor’s strategy and on the amount of precipitation makes buffelgrass a robust invader. However, our results showed that growing buffelgrass with drought tolerant perennial grass neighbors reduced buffelgrass shoot biomass by up to 95% when grown in drought conditions. This indicates that seeding with native grasses after buffelgrass treatment is a beneficial option for suppressing re-invasion from the seedbank.

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Acknowledgements

Thank you to Albert Kline, Angel Vega, and Tristan Stevens for their assistance in the greenhouse. Thank you to the Funk lab for their assistance processing the leaf samples.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Natural Resources and the Environment, University of Arizona, PO Box 210137, Tucson, AZ, 85721, USA

    Hannah L. Farrell, Darin Law & Elise S. Gornish

  2. Department of Plant Sciences, University of California, Davis, CA, 95616, USA

    Jennifer Funk

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  1. Hannah L. Farrell
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  2. Jennifer Funk
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  3. Darin Law
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  4. Elise S. Gornish
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Contributions

HLF & ESG conceived of the research idea; HLF and DL collected data; HLF performed statistical analyses; HLF wrote the paper; all authors discussed the results and commented on the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Hannah L. Farrell.

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Appendix

Appendix

See Fig. 3 .

Fig. 3
figure 3

Traits of native grasses grown alone, separated into their drought strategy group: ‘drought avoiding’, ‘drought escaping’, and ‘drought tolerating’. Circles are drawn around 80% confidence intervals. Stress = 0.11

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Farrell, H.L., Funk, J., Law, D. et al. Impacts of drought and native grass competition on buffelgrass (Pennisetum ciliare). Biol Invasions 24, 697–708 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10530-021-02671-9

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