Department of Botany and Plant Sciences
University of California Riverside
Plant Invasions & Management
Environmental changes – rising temperatures, changed precipitation patterns, increased atmospheric deposition – are affecting ecosystems at an unprecedented scale and pace. A critical challenge is to understand and predict how these global changes affect the interactions that mediate ecological diversity. This challenge is further complicated by the fact that plant communities are often responding to multiple drivers of global change. In light of the these potential synergistic interactions, there has been a renewed interest in using a more holistic system approach to not only predict how ecological systems may change but to inform management and restoration practices. Our work is aimed at identifying such potential synergistic interactions among environmental change factors to predict future invasions and guide restoration efforts.
Tackling a new plant invader - Stinknet
Western Riverside County is currently experiencing a widespread invasion by an annual forb from South Africa, Oncosiphon pilulifer, which we affectionately call Stinknet. Within the last decade, many of the open grasslands in the semi-arid system have been converted to monocultures of this species. Land managers are particularly concerned as much of this habitat is also critical habitat for the endangered Stephen’s Kangaroo Rat. Our lab is leading a multi-pronged effort to understand the ecological impacts of this invasion and management strategies to most effectively control it. Check out one paper on our work: Schwab et al. 2023
Quantifying invasion & invader impacts in dryland systems
Invader abundance is often used as a proxy to quantify the impacts on the recipient native community. However, dryland systems with variable precipitation result in variable population dynamics from one year making it difficult to generalize impact. Moreover, invader impacts such as negative impacts on soil may take time to develop resulting in delays that are not readily captured by invader abundance. Our lab is working with regional agencies to disentangle the nuance related to invader impacts. Moreover predicting invader spread is a key element to invader management and we're working on some modeling approaches to document invader abundance and spread.