Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal diversity in tropical sand dune and restinga at Peró Beach in Rio de Janeiro state,Brazil

The diversity of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (sub-phylum Glomeromycotina) in two contrasting coastal ecosystems (dunes and restinga) at Peró Beach, Rio de Janeiro state, Brazil was evaluated at the end of the rainy (May) and dry (November) seasons, in 2014. A total of 22 species belonging to ten genera and five families were recorded. Glomus macrocarpum and Rhizoglomus microaggregatum had large biomass and frequencies of glomerospores at both sites. Glomerospore abundance was higher in the dry season in dunes and in the rainy season in restinga. Redundancy analysis revealed significant relationships between AMF-physical and chemical soil parameters. Shannon's index and Pielou's evenness indicated greater AMF diversity in dunes than restinga, despite the lower number of glomerospores in dunes. These results highlight the importance of knowing the AMF communities in different coastal ecosystems, especially in dunes, which due to the low vegetation cover are most frequently impacted by anthropic actions.     

Evaluating outcomes of restoration ecology projects on limited budgets: assessment of variation in sampling intensity and sampling frequency for four habitat types

While best practices for evaluating restoration ecology projects are emerging rapidly, budget constraints often limit postrestoration monitoring, which emphasizes the need for practical and efficient monitoring strategies. We examined the postrestoration outcome for an ENGO (Nature Conservancy of Canada) project, to assess retroactively how variation in intensity and frequency of sampling would have affected estimates of plant species composition, diversity, and richness over time. The project restored four habitat types (mesic forest, oak woodland, wet meadow, and sand barren) using sculptured seeding of tallgrass prairie and woody species. Species‐level plant cover was monitored annually for 10 years in 168 2 × 2–m quadrats. We performed randomization tests to examine estimates of species diversity and richness as a function of the number of quadrats sampled, and assessed the necessity of annual sampling for describing changes in species composition and successional trajectories. The randomization tests revealed that sampling 10–17 quadrats, depending on habitat type, was sufficient to obtain estimates of species diversity that were at least 95% of values obtained from the whole dataset. Species richness as a function of number of quadrats sampled did not plateau, which suggests that rather than increasing the number of sampling quadrats, richness could be estimated more efficiently using nonquadrat based sampling techniques. Nonmetric multidimensional scaling analysis revealed that plant species composition largely stabilized by 3–5 years postrestoration depending on habitat type. By that time, native, seeded species dominated the restoration, and the benefits of annual sampling for tracking changes in species composition diminished.