For decades, ecologists have been aware of the importance of disturbance in determining the structure of communities. Less is known about how patterns of disturbance affect the trajectory of community development that might emanate from efforts such as restoring natural communities. Restoration provides a distinctive opportunity to investigate the relationship between initial conditions and disturbance and their effect on the development of communities because features, such as plant species and distributions, must be chosen rather than relying on a preexisting compliment and pattern of species. This project is designed to determine how the restoration of California grassland is influenced by the initial distribution of plants and the intensity and spatial pattern of disturbance generated by pocket gophers. In addition, this experimental system will serve as a model for analyzing general features of the complex interactions between resource distribution and disturbance. The investigators will analyze the effect of plants on each other and on the disturbances generated by the animals, and the reciprocal effects of gophers on each other and the plant community. Furthermore, the experimental design will provide an opportunity to distinguish between the sum of effects of individual gophers from the effects generated by the complex social interactions between gophers which generate buffer zones of reduced disturbance. While any restoration research has an inherent site specific component, such studies can reveal general ecological patterns. The plant system and disturbance agents in this study have wide geographic distributions in North America. More generally, the conclusions drawn about the interactions between animal behavior and the coexistence of species in restored communities will be applicable in numerous other systems that are dominated by animal disturbance. Complex interactions are difficult to study, but by imposing manipulations on a system under restoration, this investigation will yield important insights into the effect of initial conditions and disturbance regimes on the trajectory of community development.
