Community assembly in restored wetlands

PhD thesis

Bettina Nygaard

Abstract

This thesis aims to infer general rules and principles for plant species assembly in restored wetlands. The thesis reports the results from four subprojects:

1) Development of a new and simple method for modelling the responses of plant functional types along environmental gradients.
2) A test of the functional characteristics of Danish wetland species as a basis for predictive modelling of wetland assembly.
3) An experimental test of the importance of water level, fluctuations and nutrient content on species composition, species richness and above-ground biomass in wetlands.
4) A comparative study of restored and natural wetlands in order to evaluate restoration success in four restored wetlands.

Full report in PDF format (1240 KB)