 Well, thank you so much for inviting me. I wish I could be there in person. It seems like a great discussion going on, and I'm happy to take part virtually. So I was invited a few years ago and kind of introduced this topic of trait-space species selection in a broader context and thinking about resilience-based ecosystem management. And I kind of wanna go through it in a little more detail today to show really the types of things that trait-based plant species selection can really help us with in restoration and reclamation specifically. And so I'll kind of go through it broadly and talk about the theory behind it, and then maybe dig into a couple of the studies that I have going on and show how this relates to not only reclamation, but it can be really important for understanding disturbance and stressors like drought. So I think it ties in well with our topic today. So historically, most restoration efforts focused on either single species populations or community composition, which is traditional in our reclamation field as well of ecological communities, but it's been recognized more and more in the restoration field that ecological processes, such as nutrient turnover, hydrological fluxes, they're critical components of this restoration outcome. And so the understanding has also been paralleled by this upsurge in ecological research that's really exploring how ecological structures like plant diversity and structural heterogeneity are related to ecological function, like biogeochemical processing and disturbance regimes. And I think reclamation has been a bit at the forefront of some of this in that there's always been this push to understand what the underlying soil communities are doing and how we need to minimize erosion and increase biogeochemical functioning before we can get our plant species established. But it's maybe a little more behind in this from the terms of the biotic understanding. So we still have that strong idea of a reference community where we have communities surrounding the pipeline or the well pad or the mine, and we wanna mimic those, but that's not always the most desirable case because of some of the changes that have been going on in the ecosystem. And then we also have some new and potentially very complicating factors such as invasion. And so some of the work that I'm gonna talk to you about talks a lot about increasing invasion resistance because we do have a problem where we have disturbances that create invasion highways or create invasion spring off points for invasion to go into more intact ecosystems. And so identifying these reclamation processes that are the biotic component of it that also speak to ecosystem structure could be key to understanding this invasion resistance, decreasing secondary invasions or re-invasions if we remove invasive species from an area where we've done reclamation and then also identifying reclamation strategies or management over the long term because these things don't exist in a vacuum. They go on over time and a lot of times we forget about the processes that maintain these ecosystems. So quantitative traits based approaches have emerged as an important tool for predicting responses in community composition as a result of disturbance and stressors across a wide range of environmental conditions. The interesting thing about them is they're linked to ecosystem functioning. So traits are measurable properties of individuals and they relate to their functioning and they're modulating of their fitness traits such that we can capture the interactions between organisms and their environment, both the biotic and the abiotic components of it. And there are things like photosynthetic pathway, leaf area, plant growth, phenology type, leaf nitrogen, all of these different types of traits. So here I just have an example of the different functions that go on for a plant population. And so this is an example of how those functions relate to traits. And so in understanding the fitness of a plant we would think about its fecundity, its dispersal, its recruitment. And then the traits that I have listed opposite there kind of show you what types of traits we would look at if we were interested in understanding the potential to be fecund and disperse widely and have good recruitment. So we would look at things like seed mass, reproductive height and reproductive phenology. And then there are all sorts of other functions that occur in a plant community, light interception. It changes the competitive environment. We think about vegetation height when we wanna measure those sorts of things. Resource acquisition and growth, of course, is a big one in competition, especially with invasive plants because if you can't acquire resources then they will be taken by invasive plants. And so we think about traits of the leaves, photosynthetic capacity, that sort of acquisition of light and resources and turning it into plant parts and reproductive parts and vegetative parts. And then letter decompositions often looked at by the near infrared spectrum where they can determine the litter composition by looking at different ratios of infrared spectra. And then things like absorption, carbon fluxes, underground competition. We think about plant soil interactions and how the plant interacts with different the microbes and the nutrients there. And then we can measure traits like root density and root diameter. So those are some of the traits and how they relate to functions. So when we're thinking about this, we have functional traits and that's the broad idea of a trait. These are the ecological attributes of the species. They relate to the resource capture and reproductive components of the plant, but they also affect the pool of resources and the ecosystems. So when we're thinking about traits, we can break them down into these response traits and effect traits. And effect traits are the traits that influence the ecosystem processes. And this is why plant traits high our understanding of community assembly to ecosystem process because we have these suite of traits that influence productivity, nutrient cycling, trophic transfer. We also have response traits. And these traits describe the species responses to biotic and abiotic factors like resource availability, competition from invasive species, herbivory pressure, how it deals with stressors. And so these aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. We can have a response trait that's also an effect trait, but when we think about these together, then we're starting to understand how ecosystem services and functions and community assembly are tied together through plant traits. And so this is just an example from my research on thinking about how quantitative trait based analyses can help us understand a plant's response to the environment. So we have this idea of traits has been around for a long time. Grime developed his CSR model in the late 70s, early 80s. And basically it suggests that increasing competition, increasing disturbance and increasing stressors are three axes of responses where a plant will respond to each of these things. And so we'll fall into a certain area of this triangle. So competitive species are on the high end of increasing competition on the low end of disturbance. And then ruderal species are on the high end of disturbance and the low end of stress, so on and so forth. So what we were able to do in this research was to look at traits. We developed two axes. So on our X axis here, we have a morphology index and that speaks to the traits of different trees. So this was in studying Appalachian Mountains and we looked at different tree species and what their morphology was. And we were able to look at all of the species in relationship to each other and plot their differences in morphology by this axis. And then on the Y axis, we took the same species and we looked at an index relating to their relative growth rates and their growth constant. So this was a suite of traits that were speaking to how quickly the plant grew. And so when we look at a combination of this morphological index and this growth index, we're able to look at these tree species individually and see where they fall out on Grimes triangle or his CSR model. And so we have some species that are ruderal, some that are competitive and some that are stress tolerant. And the reason we wanted to do this was because we thought that this might be an important step in explaining their response to disturbance. So in this case, we looked at their response to an ice storm and it turned out that stress tolerant species were more robust to ice storms and tended to have less mortality and competitive species tended to have some mortality but not as much as ruderal species. And so we can really see how these traits can help us think about the species that are gonna respond in certain ways. And the thing that's nice about this is that although it's parameterized at a specific location, these species exist across the Eastern United States. And so we're able to apply this understanding broadly based on their traits to other species and these species in other locations and other environments. So this is just kind of a theoretical framework that was developed by Leveril and Garnier. And it kind of speaks to that understanding that traits simultaneously explain plant responses and ecosystem effects. So we have in letter A up here, this is how our traits are filtering our communities. And so we have some environmental factor, doesn't have to be a change but environmental factor like a soil type or a competitive structure. And you will have a response tree and the response tree determines how a plant will respond to that environmental change. But there's a suite of different environmental conditions that plants are responding to. And so these response traits are said to filter the community. And then that goes further through this filter of competition to develop our community structure. And so when we think about community structure in response to global change drivers like drought, we have biodiversity and richness interacting with that global change environment. And that shows how our effect traits come about. So how does the different flecks in this community and their traits, community of traits feed into ecosystem functioning? And this is kind of the model that they ultimately came up with by putting these two things together where you have environmental conditions or changes and they can be biotic or abiotic and they feed into this traits box. And those traits are response traits and effects traits and maybe those interlap or overlap in some areas or maybe they're separate. And those response traits tend to determine our community structure and diversity, effects traits, our ecosystem functioning and those two things feed back to each other. So this is how plant traits tie our community composition to our ecosystem functioning and therefore could be essential in understanding reclamation from a process-based approach. So just as an example, I'm gonna talk a little bit about study that I'm setting up right now. This is one that we were hoping to start a few years ago but seeds were limited at the beginning of the COVID crisis and then throughout everyone knows impacted our ability to get this out in the field last year. So hopefully we're moving to the field phase of this year. So I don't have results for you but I'm just gonna go through the design of this so you can understand how these plant traits might contribute to our understanding of restoration or reclamation. So we wanted to determine the strategies for effective reclamation of an oil and gas pipeline and invaded grasslands. Colleagues of mine at the Sydney ARS here determined that crested wheatgrass was one of the worst invaders into pipelines in the region. They found several invasive species increased during pipeline construction immediately thereafter and crested wheatgrass was the only one that really stuck around and kind of spread down those pipelines. So this is why we picked it as a focal species for this study. So I hypothesis is that its invasion rates are influenced by the functional traits of the species selected for seeding reclaimed pipelines. And so just to kind of understand trait space I went over it a little bit in that ordination of the trees but this is maybe a more theoretical approach. So we have our native species here in this blue box and our invasive species here in this yellow circle. They're the white dots and the natives are the black dots. And if we look at traits like leaf mass per area leaf nitrogen, water use efficiency, photosynthesis we can look at where did these two groups of species overlap? So if we were interested in understanding the traits that define the native species and the invasive species and how similar they are we can put the different traits into ordination space which is what these PCAs are which just basically shows the similarity or dissimilarity among these species based on a multivariate suite of traits. And so we did that with our Cresta wheatgrass study. And so we basically have these two theories of community assembly that have been implicated in invasion dynamics and limiting similarities has been shown to be really important in some situations. Competitive hierarchies has been shown to be really important in other situations. And basically what these two theories suggest is the theory of limiting similarities based on principles of competitive exclusion. So it holds that species coexist because of niche differentiation. So given this a mix of species that are functionally similar to our invasive species would potentially keep it from establishing. Competitive hierarchies is based on theories of competition. It holds that there are some traits that are very important to competition. And so species with traits and trait values that are higher than our invasive species for those super competitive traits would always win in a mix. And so since sometimes limiting similarities is an important theory and sometimes competitive hierarchies is and ecological theory hasn't really sussed out when one is more important than the other. We decided to apply both of these in our study. And so basically what we did was we took the traits of all of the different species of grasses and a suite of species of forbs that we were interested in that are suited to the area that grow alongside crested wheat grass and that we could get seeds of. And we pulled these traits from the tri-plants traits database which is a big database that has hundreds of thousands of plant entries in it. And scientists will submit their traits that they've measured. And so you can get these measured traits for all of the species of interest pretty much. There was only one species that we didn't get to include because we didn't have a good range of traits for that species. And so these are the traits that we had data for for all of the species that are important traits as far as resource acquisition goes and reproduction and competition. And we've ordinated them. And so we have here the numbers represent the species. This black dot number one here is our invader crested wheat grass. And so according to limiting similarities we would want to pick species that were very similar in trait space to our invader. So we picked species like seven, five, four, 32. And I did write down what these were. So Psydotes, Gramma, Lepticulo, Fusca which is Wrangletop, Sixpike wheat grass and Tummelgrass ended up being the ones that were very close to crested wheat grass. And then for competitive hierarchies we picked species that came out really high in this. So this axis here represents 15% of our variation whereas this one is 29%. So the ones that are way out on the end of these axes are the ones that show the most variation. And these turned out to be photosynthetic traits. So we had photosynthetic rate here and specific leaf area or stem model conductance. And those are very important to resource acquisition and competition as is specifically leaf area which talks about how much area there is for photosynthesis to occur. And so we, for competitive hierarchies we picked winning species that were beating acrystatum on these axes, which was pretty easy because most of them were, but we picked the winningest. And so we ended up with species like buffalo grass and purple threon, little barley and little blue stem. And so we wanted to compare these seed mixes directly. We did also do a similar ordination for forbs to select a suite of forbs because it's important to have different functional groups in our mixes because that increases the ecosystem functioning and processes that are provided by these. So we added, we did a similar ordination for forbs and selected forb species as well. And so we're starting now the greenhouse trial where we have complete control over external conditions. And so this is well-watered environment where we're measuring the plant trait responses and the growth of all of our species that were selected under our two different theories and the spread of Cresta wheatgrass and its mixture. And then we're moving that into the field where we're going to simulate pipeline disturbance by removing topsoil, putting it back and then planting these species in different small plots. And that way we can replicate and we have a similar environmental controls. We can also layer on different disturbances. We're going to do grazing. We might do drought at some point. And then eventually we'll move this up to a field base where we have a broader scale. We have the seed mixes interacting with their environments. We have different climates, different soil types. And so we can start to see how all of these different functional trait interactions might break down or hold up under different conditions like drought or different soil types where one might be winning and another might be not as well and not doing as well. And so just in a few quick other applications of a trait-based approach, we just did a study where we modeled fire spread through green strips. And green strips are used out west a lot to stop cheatgrass fires because cheatgrass will carry fire very readily. It's a lot of fine fuel and people are, and the BLM especially is putting a lot of money into how do we create fire breaks that won't cause ecological damage. So they want to use native species but we need to know what types of species will actually change this spread of fire. And so we did a trait-based selection of native species for effective green strips. And we compared the traits by altering different parameters of the fire spread model. And so total fuel load is related to productivity. You see that up here. Fine to coarse fuel ratio is related to stemming us. How much leaves versus how many stems. Live fuel moisture content, that's a trait of plants where if they stay green for a long time or they dry out and senesce. And then live dead fuel ratio also speaks to that senescence. So something like crested wheat grass when it hits a droughty period will drop a lot of its leaf or senesce a lot of its leaves in order to have some drought tolerance. And so we looked at that. And so basically we were able to use these plant traits to determine what combination of traits a species needs to have to effectively halt fire into these cheap grass dominated areas. And then also starting a collaboration with Drew Scott and Mandan to look at trait-based selection of species for prairie strips between row crops. And this is to increase ecosystem services. So they want to plant a lot of pollinator species in here to slow some of the runoff and erosion but it's in a Kentucky bluegrass dominated area. So the fear is that these prairie strips will be seeded and then Kentucky bluegrass will just take over. So we're looking at what kind of traits based selection for the grass species can we do that might slow the Kentucky bluegrass invasion into these areas. So this could also be applied to drought. And I kind of alluded to that but I want to talk about it a little more specifically since that's what this conference is focusing on. So we talked about plant functional traits there determining their response to the environment. So this includes moisture availability and that's kind of the obvious point. And these are linked to ecosystem functioning. So resilience to drought stress is actually an important ecosystem function that's an emergent property of the traits in the community. And so we can assess the community resilience to drought stress by looking at these traits. And so quantifying co-variation among the traits just means what traits are integrated what traits come together and how are they context dependent? So what's the environment that makes those adaptive? So when we think about this we can think about co-variation among traits that are related to drought strategies and I'll talk about drought strategies and what this looks like more specifically in the next slide. And then does the expression of these relate to the drought regime, the timing, the intensity, the frequency. So there's three strategies that have been identified in ecological literature that plants use for coping with water stress. Drought escape in which plants flower and reproduce early and complete their entire life cycle before drought conditions worsen. Drought avoidance, they invest in resources that reduce water stress. And this is an example of drought avoidance here with the roots you can see the native species from this suite of species selected have really long roots. And so they're able to tap into some soil moisture that has not yet been depleted by a drought. Whereas these non-natives, they have as much shallower root system. So they do really well when their water is available but they won't be able to tap into that extra water later in the season. And then drought tolerance is lower the metabolic activity and growth rates so that you're reducing your demand for water during a drought. And that's something like the skeet tree which has very dissected leaves, very small leaves. So it doesn't do as much photosynthesis during drought because it doesn't have a very large leaf area but it's also not losing so much water through transpiration because leaves are much smaller. And this teacrass is the example of drought escape where it flowers and reproduces early in the season. And it's been shown to even do that more so under drought conditions than under well water conditions. And so these are just the traits that tend to be associated with each of the strategies. So we have rapid growth, early flowering, high leaf nitrogen level and high photosynthetic capacity allows the plant to grow to reproductive age quickly so it can do this rapid reproduction. And this is adaptive and usually occurs in species that experience frequent drought at the end of growing seasons like teacrass that grows in arid areas where we have droughts in the summer months. Drought avoidance, they tend to have high water use efficiency, low stomatal conductance so they're not losing water into the atmosphere and then these dense dissected or succulent leaves. And these are pretty, these are adaptive in a lot of different drought conditions but more so in mild or moderate drought than severe drought. And then the drought tolerant species tend to have a lot of plasticity in their osmotic adjustments so they can stop losing water and stop photosynthesizing when the drought stress occurs. And then also they accumulate sugars in their roots so they grow more roots, longer roots so they can maintain that dormancy over the long term while they're not photosynthesizing and not growing. And those are more adaptive in severe drought situations. And so thinking about this with regards to our crested wheatgrass study if we wanted to think about how do we account for drought during our trait selection? So crested wheatgrass is one of the types of species that expands its leaves rapidly during the spring and then senesces during drought. So it kind of has a drought escape strategy but also a bit of a drought tolerance strategy and then something like a teacrass or our other annual invasives they do this drought escape where they reproduce really early. They have high photosynthesis and reproduce a lot and then they are done with their life cycle during the drought. And so how would we apply our theories to this? So we could account for the drought by choosing species with similar strategies if limiting similarities is the theory that works in our system. But if competitive hierarchies is we would wanna choose species that do better. So higher photosynthetic max rates so that they can escape drought better or more tolerant longer roots if they're drought avoiders. And so basically you wanna pick the best of the drought competitors in the competitive hierarchies. And so we also have to think about this in terms of trade offs because for all of this these are trade offs between resource conservatism and rapid acquisition. So obviously rapid acquisition is great for competition when conditions are really good, well water conditions but resource conservatism becomes more important when our resources are reduced during water stress. And so to try and get at some of this we set up a drought study where we're looking at the traits that are related to drought tolerance strategies for both native and invasive species. Conducting the study at Fort Keough with Lance Vermeer and we're looking at drought imposed during different parts of the growing season. And he's been doing this drought imposition for a long time where he has spring drought, a summer drought and a fall drought. And so he's seen some plant community compositional shifts but hasn't really understood the whole mechanisms behind that. So we're assessing some of the plant traits especially looking at things like photosynthesis and resource capture and stomatal conduct and some water use efficiency to try and understand how the different species are responding to drought in the way that they seem to be in such that they're creating a compositional shift and why that compositional shift is occurring given the traits and the interactions among the traits. And so we're also overlaying a burning regime on that where we assess whether prescribed burning interacts with drought to impact these drought responses. And so we're able to look at all the traits how they shift with drought and fire and how that creates a competitive advantage or disadvantage for the different species that are in this ecosystem. So understanding these traits that confer resistance and resilience I think can really help us in that we're able to understand focus on the ecosystem processes that are necessary to maintain these negative feedbacks. And then also it increases transferability across systems because if we can identify suites of traits that are common to common invaders and suites of traits that are common to native species that are important in increasing invasion resistance then we can use this theoretical approach to transfer that to a different ecosystem and we'll know which types of species because of the trait based approach that we need to incorporate in our restorations. So understanding the traits that confer resilience can help us not only understand how plant communities are going to respond to different disturbances and processes which helps us design management for these reclamations, pick species that are gonna persist over the long term but it'll also help us identify how these species are contributing to ecosystem function and that's that process-based approach that we talked about at the beginning. And so not only do we have a process-based approach when it comes to the biotic factors like thinking about soil amendments and soil microbial communities but we can also take this process-based approach with our biotic factors when selecting our species and that'll help us in having effective reclamations that minimize the amount of invasion that happens and then also can increase the resistance and resilience to different stressors such as drought and grazing and fire and all of the things that our rangelands are subjected to over time. And hopefully I have time for questions. I enjoyed your talk. I was just wondering if you have any specific examples of plant species that you were talking about in a given situation? Yeah, so, well, we haven't gotten any results from our tests yet but the species that seem to come out as being competitive with crested regress were those with the similar traits and it's gonna differ depending on what your goals are. So if your goals are drought tolerance, then you can kind of pick those traits for drought if your goals are a resisting invasion of Kentucky bluegrass it's a different set of traits because Kentucky bluegrass has a different set of traits. And so I guess there's been some examples where limiting similarities has been useful in reducing the amount of invasive annual grasses. A lot of those examples came out of California where they have grasses similar to cheatgrass, a lot of invasive annuals and they were able to reduce their prevalence by picking species that had similar high reproductive output and high photosynthetic rates. And then competitive hierarchies showed to be really pretty important in shrub communities in a couple of studies where they were able to pick shrubs that grew faster and were able to resist drought and fire more than the invasive species were. But for our system, we don't, we'll be sharing results with you as soon as we get some but we're not too sure yet which whether competitive hierarchies are gonna be more important or limiting similarities and that's something we hope to tease out and that'll determine which species come out as being really important. But again, it's context dependent and depends on which invader you're trying to confer resistance against if you have a suite of invaders and you have to think about a suite of traits if it's just drought stress that you're trying to increase the tolerance to and then it's an entirely different suite of species. So it's gonna be pretty context dependent depending on the goals of your reclamation.