Lessons from the invasion of <scp><i>Spartina alterniflora</i></scp> in coastal China

Nie, Ming; Liu, Wenwen; Pennings, Steven C.; Li, Bo

doi:10.1002/ecy.3874

Cited by 13 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…For example, large‐scale invasion of Spartina spp. (cordgrass) on the global coastal wetlands (Goss‐Custard & Moser 1988; Tubbs et al 1992; Nie et al 2022) has led to reduced mudflat areas available to shorebirds and a further decrease in its richness and abundance. In addition, the proliferation of vegetation may displace migratory shorebirds by tree‐dwelling wading birds (Huang et al 2012).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impact of coastal island restoration engineering and subsequent tourism on migratory waterbirds: a 3‐year case from Southern China

Liu

Tang

et al. 2023

Restoration Ecology

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Coastal engineering poses a significant threat to the survival of migratory waterbirds worldwide. However, the mechanisms through which engineering affects waterbirds are still unclear. To gain a better understanding of this issue, we conducted a three‐year survey of waterbirds on Shanxinsha Island, which underwent restoration engineering, along the East Asian–Australasian Flyway. We compared the seasonal migratory change among different species groups through and after the island restoration engineering. We observed a total monthly maximum count of 118,506 individuals from 61 waterbird species over the span of 38 months, including eight globally threatened species and five species that exceeded 1% of the flyway population. Throughout the survey periods, the average number of total waterbirds and small shorebirds observed during the migrating season decreased by 52.7 and 48.6%, respectively. The massive loss of high‐tide roosting areas was the primary factor contributing to this decline. The combined effects of increased vegetation and deeper water levels resulted in a 38.8% reduction in exposed tidal flat area, as determined through land cover verification and fractional vegetation cover calculations. While tourism activities exhibited fewer negative consequences compared to island restoration engineering, they had a greater impact on small breeding shorebirds. Our study showed that small shorebirds were particularly susceptible to island restoration engineering, whereas large shorebirds and swimming birds were more flexible in their use of roosting or foraging sites. We suggest that the impact of future coastal engineering requires more detailed assessment and monitoring, especially for small migratory shorebirds.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impact of coastal island restoration engineering and subsequent tourism on migratory waterbirds: a 3‐year case from Southern China

Liu

Tang

et al. 2023

Restoration Ecology

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“…Biological invasion is a significant component of human-caused global environmental change [67]. S. alterniflora, native to the East and Gulf Coasts of North America, has caused considerable ecological and economic damages [68,69]. Due to its high reproductive ability and strong adaptability to adverse environmental factors such as elevated salinity [70], S. alterniflora has become one of most important invasive salt marshes, threatening China's coastal wetlands [6,71].…”

Section: Implications For S Alterniflora Control and Managementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tracking the Dynamics of Spartina alterniflora with WorldView-2/3 and Sentinel-1/2 Imagery in Zhangjiang Estuary, China

Dong,

Huang,

Gao

2024

Water

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The invasion of Spartina alterniflora (S. alterniflora) has posed serious threats to the sustainability, quality and biodiversity of coastal wetlands. To safeguard coastal ecosystems, China has enacted large-scale S. alterniflora removal projects, which set the goal of effectively controlling S. alterniflora throughout China by 2025. The accurate monitoring of S. alterniflora with remote sensing is urgent and requisite for the scientific eradication, control and management of this invasive plant. In this study, we combined multi-temporal WorldView-2/3 (WV-2/3) and Sentinel-1/2 imagery to monitor the S. alterniflora dynamics before and after the S. alterniflora removal projects in Zhangjiang Estuary. We put forward a new method for S. alterniflora detection with eight-band WV-2/3 imagery. The proposed method first used NDVI to discriminate S. alterniflora from water, mud flats and mangroves based on Ostu thresholding and then used the red-edge, NIR1 and NIR2 bands and support vector machine (SVM) classifier to distinguish S. alterniflora from algae. Due to the contamination of frequent cloud cover and tidal inundation, the long revisit time of high-resolution satellite sensors and the short-term S. alterniflora removal projects, we combined Sentinel-1 SAR time series and Sentinel-2 optical imagery to monitor the S. alterniflora removal project status in 2023. The overall accuracies of the S. alterniflora detection results here are above 90%. Compared with the traditional SVM method, the proposed method achieved significantly higher identification accuracy. The S. alterniflora area was 115.19 hm2 in 2015, 152.40 hm2 in 2017 and 15.29 hm2 in 2023, respectively. The generated S. alterniflora maps clearly show the clonal growth of S. alterniflora in Zhangjiang Estuary from 2015 to 2017, and the large-scale S. alterniflora eradication project has achieved remarkable results with a removal rate of about 90% in the study area. With the continuous implementation of the “Special Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Spartina alterniflora (2022–2025)” which aims to eliminate more than 90% of S. alterniflora in all provinces in China by 2025, the continual high-spatial resolution monitoring of S. alterniflora is crucial to control secondary invasion and restore coastal wetlands.

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“…A prime example of the disproportionate effect of nutrient enrichment on invasion can be found in coastal China, where high exogenous N availability has promoted the invasion of Spartina alterniflora (Xu et al., 2020), a notorious invasive plant species spreading to coastal and estuarine wetlands globally (Strong & Ayres, 2013). Since it was introduced in the 1970s, S. alterniflora has spread rapidly and has become the most dominant species in China's coastal salt marshes (Nie et al., 2022). This dynamic provides an opportunity to evaluate the underlying mechanisms that govern plant invasion under nutrient enrichment.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Root plasticity benefits a global invasive species in eutrophic coastal wetlands

Liu,

Zhang,

et al. 2023

Functional Ecology

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Invasive species usually benefit more than native species from increases in nutrient availability. Phenotypic plasticity in above‐ground traits has often been used to explain the superiority of invasive species in response to increased nutrient availability. However, it remains largely unclear whether and how root trait plasticity predicts the ascendancy of invasive plants following nutrient enrichment. Using a 3‐year field nitrogen (N) enrichment experiment, we evaluated the effect of N enrichment on the root traits and growth performance of a globally invasive cordgrass, Spartina alterniflora, and a co‐occurring native plant, Phragmites australis. We found that S. alterniflora exhibited high plasticity in root traits in response to N enrichment, whereas the root traits of P. australis largely remained unresponsive to fertilization. Specifically, in response to N enrichment, S. alterniflora decreased soil exploitation with a lower length ratio of lateral to adventitious roots. However, the root traits of S. alterniflora shifted to be more acquisitive under N enrichment with higher root N concentrations and lower root tissue density. Moreover, there were a series of anatomical adjustments in the adventitious roots of S. alterniflora in response to N enrichment, such as a thicker diameter, lower living cortex‐to‐stele ratio and higher xylem‐to‐root area ratio. These plastic adjustments in root traits jointly resulted in fast nutrient uptake and transportation in S. alterniflora, boosting its above‐ground productivity under fertile N conditions. Our study demonstrated that greater plasticity in root traits enables a globally successful invasive species to take advantages of increased nutrient availability, potentially increasing its invasiveness. We suggest that consideration of root traits can improve our understanding of below‐ground mechanisms underlying invasion under global nutrient enrichment. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

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Lessons from the invasion of Spartina alterniflora in coastal China

Cited by 13 publications

References 25 publications

Impact of coastal island restoration engineering and subsequent tourism on migratory waterbirds: a 3‐year case from Southern China

Impact of coastal island restoration engineering and subsequent tourism on migratory waterbirds: a 3‐year case from Southern China

Tracking the Dynamics of Spartina alterniflora with WorldView-2/3 and Sentinel-1/2 Imagery in Zhangjiang Estuary, China

Root plasticity benefits a global invasive species in eutrophic coastal wetlands

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