Advancing our understanding of biological invasion-biodiversity relationships using imaging spectroscopy
Hamed Gholizadeh, Oklahoma State University, hamed.gholizadeh@okstate.edu (Presenter)
Invasive plants can alter ecosystem composition, structure, and function, which in turn may have significant negative environmental and economic impacts. There is a critical need to monitor biological invasions; however, the crux of the matter is that the degree to which invasive plants affect different ecosystem characteristics is not consistent in space and time, highlighting the need for large scale studies. Optical remote sensing–which measures reflected light from the Earth surface–is capable of capturing several key ecosystem characteristics across large scales. Our goal was to use remote sensing and in-situ observations to determine the degree to which invasive plants affect plant diversity. We focused on Lespedeza cuneata (hereafter L. cuneata), an aggressive invasive plant in grasslands of the U.S. Southern Great Plains.
We collected in-situ data from 900 1 m × 1 m quadrats at the Joseph Williams Tallgrass Prairie Preserve, OK, USA in summer 2022. These data included species composition, foliage traits associated with plant function (e.g., nitrogen and phosphorus content), and plant height. We also collected airborne hyperspectral data with spatial resolution of 1 m covering the 400–2450 nm range. We then assessed the capability of remote sensing to reveal the impact of biological invasion on grassland diversity expressed as taxonomic and functional diversity.
Our results showed that L. cuneata invasion did not affect taxonomic diversity. This finding can be attributed to the fact that although L. cuneata significantly decreased percent cover of native grasses (graminoids), it did not affect native forbs, which generally represent bulk of the plant diversity in grasslands. L. cuneata invasion, however, significantly affected community traits and functional diversity. These results indicate that while the addition of one species (L. cuneata) can minimally affect taxonomic diversity–for example, through increasing the overall species richness by one–it can drastically modify functional diversity. Overall, our analyses show that imaging spectroscopy is a viable option to advance our understanding of biological invasion-biodiversity relationships across large spatial extents.
Associated Project(s):
Poster Location ID: 2-39
Presentation Type: Poster
Session: Poster Session 2
Session Date: Wed (May 10) 5:15-7:15 PM
CCE Program: BDEC