Facilitation by nurse plants contributes to vegetation recovery in human-disturbed desert ecosystems

Abstract

Facilitation by nurse plants is a common interaction in harsh environments and this positive plant-plant interaction may promote vegetation recovery in ecosystems affected by human activities. Determining the relevance of this process, however, requires assessing how nurse plants influence the establishment of other species, as well as the proportion of species in the regional species pool that would benefit from the presence of nurse plants in human-disturbed areas. Further, since vegetation recovery is a time-dependent process, the community-level consequences of facilitation are likely to vary among landscapes with different disturbance history. thus, an integrative perspective of the relevance of nurse plants for vegetation recovery could be obtained by measuring their effects across different human-disturbed landscapes of the target region. this study focuses on these issues and uses a regional-scale approach to assess the community-level effects of a widespread nurse plant of American deserts, the creosotebush (Larrea tridentata).