Identifying critical recruitment bottlenecks limiting seedling establishment in a degraded seagrass ecosystem.

ABSTRACT: Identifying early life-stage transitions limiting seagrass recruitment could improve our ability to target demographic processes most responsive to management. Here we determine the magnitude of life-stage transitions along gradients in physical disturbance limiting seedling establishment for the marine angiosperm, Posidonia australis. Transition matrix models and sensitivity analyses were used to identify which transitions were critical for successful seedling establishment during the first year of seed recruitment and projection models were used to predict the most appropriate environments and seeding densities. Total survival probability of seedlings was low (0.001), however, transition probabilities between life-stages differed across the environmental gradients; seedling recruitment w

SUBMITTER: Statton J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5665928 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature