Feb 6, 2018
Large-scale removal of beachgrass leads to new life for endangered coastal lupine
By Talio Ogliore
Excavators and bulldozers unearthed invasive beachgrass from sand dunes at Point Reyes National Seashore in 2010. The removal has resulted in a large and lasting reduction in seed predation pressure for a native coastal lupine (Photo: Eleanor Pardini/Washington University).
A rare, coastal flowering plant known as Tidestrom’s lupine — threatened by native deer mice that can munch up to three-quarters of its unripe fruits under cover of an invasive beachgrass — has been given a new life with the large-scale removal of that grass, a long-term study shows.
“The key is that you have to have pretty near-complete removal of the above-ground biomass of this plant to remove the hiding place, the refuge (for the mouse),” said Eleanor Pardini, assistant director of environmental studies and a research scientist in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. “That’s one of the reasons it was so effective.”
Pardini and her colleagues have just released observations from more than 13 years of working with the delicate, purple Lupinus tidestromii at the Point Reyes National Seashore north of San Francisco. She is the first author of the new study published online in advance of the Feb. 12 issue of Restoration Ecology.
Read the entire article at The Source below.