Correction: Long-Term Regional Shifts in Plant Community Composition Are Largely Explained by Local Deer Impact Experiments

Abstract

Abstract, the fourth and fifth sentences should read: "Among common species, 12 were more abundant outside the exclosures, 14 were commoner inside, and 66 had similar abundances in-and outside. Deer herbivory greatly increased the abundance of graminoids and nearly doubled the abundance of exotic plants." The ninth sentence should read: "The effects of herbivory by white-tailed deer account for many of the long-term regional shifts observed in species' abundances (R 2 = 0.25)."In the "Data on 50-year shifts in abundance" section, the first three sentences should read: "To test whether the differences in species abundance that we observed in-vs. outside the exclosures were related to the long-term (1950s to 2001) regional shifts in abundance measured by Wiegmann and Waller [33] over 62 sites, we first calculated the change in abundance across the fence line as the arithmetic difference of each taxon's frequency in the control browsed plots minus its frequency inside the exclosure plots. We then calculated each taxon's change in abundance over the last 50 years as the arithmetic difference between its frequency in 2000 minus its frequency in the 1950s. We excluded rare species that occurred less than 5 times in both data sets, leaving 53 species for the analysis."In the "Data analyses" section, the last sentence of the first paragraph reads: "We restricted these tests to species that occurred in at least 50 quadrats overall and had expected frequencies greater than five in each treatment." Because of the lower abundances in the corrected dataset, the authors no longer put the 50 quadrat restriction on the analysis and the text should now read: "We restricted these tests to species that had expected frequencies of greater than five in each treatment."Because the authors no longer use the 50 quadrat restriction, the first sentence of the "Species' responses to deer" section should read: "Of the 256 species encountered in the exclosure and browsed plots, 97 occurred commonly enough (expected value of 5) to analyze differences in abundance in-and outside the fences using χ 2 tests."Some of the results have therefore changed, and the remainder of the "Species' responses to deer" section should read: "Twelve species were more abundant in browsed plots while fourteen were more abundant in exclosures ( Table 2). The other 66 species did not differ in abundance between treatments. Species that increased in the presence of deer included three native forbs (Coptis trifolia: 4.5x, Rubus pubescens: 4x, and Symphyotrichum lateriflorum: 2x), two non-native forbs (Hieracium aurantiacum: 4.5x and Lapsana communis: 2x), a fern (Pteridium aquilinum: 7x), two native (Schizachne purpurascens: 2.8x and Carex pensylvanica: 2.5x) and one non-native graminoids (Poa compresa: 5.5x), and three woody species (Ostrya virginiana:PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone

Characterizing the demographic history and prion protein variation to infer susceptibility to chronic wasting disease in a naïve population of white‐tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus)

“…The northern range of deer is primarily limited by snow but decreasing winter severity has allowed deer to expand northward beyond their historical range limits (Dawe & Boutin, 2016; Kennedy‐Slaney et al, 2018). This expansion has implications for ecosystems as, for example, deer herbivory alters long‐term regional habitat characteristics and plant communities (Frerker et al, 2017; Kroeger et al, 2020; Otsu et al, 2019). Further, deer are an important prey species and predator populations increasing in response to deer expansion has led to greater predation and apparent interspecific competition with other ungulates (Barber‐Meyer & Mech, 2016; Latham et al, 2013).…”

Characterizing the demographic history and prion protein variation to infer susceptibility to chronic wasting disease in a naïve population of white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus)

“…The northern range of deer is primarily limited by snow but decreasing winter severity has allowed deer to expand northward beyond their historical range limits (Dawe & Boutin, 2016; Kennedy-Slaney, Bowman, Walpole, & Pond, 2018). This expansion has implications for ecosystems as, for example, deer herbivory alters long-term regional habitat characteristics and plant communities (Frerker, Sabo, & Waller, 2017; Otsu, Iijima, & Nagaike, 2019; Kroeger et al, 2020). Further, deer are an important prey species and predator populations increasing in response to deer expansion has led to greater predation and apparent interspecific competition with other ungulates (Latham et al, 2013; Barber-Meyer & Mech, 2016).…”