Estimating floristic integrity in tallgrass prairie

Indices are needed in habitat conservation and restoration to provide repeatable measures relevant to conservation goals. A monitoring and research program was established at Nachusa Grasslands in north-central Illinois (USA) to assess progress in tallgrass prairie restoration and reconstruction efforts and evaluate the effectiveness of indices used to measure community-level properties related to vegetation integrity. Indices selected for comparison included standard diversity measures (e.g., Shannon–Weiner Index, Evenness, Species Richness) and indices developed specifically to estimate vegetation integrity. These latter indices included two unweighted diversity indices, the Species Richness Index and Native Richness Index, and two indices weighted by characteristics of species composition, the Floristic Quality Index (FQI) and its component Mean Coefficient of Conservatism (Mean C). A coefficient of conservatism (CC) is an integer ranging from 0 to 10 assigned a priori to each taxon in a regional flora that estimates the fidelity of a species to natural areas (non-native and most ruderal species are assigned 0 or low values, respectively; species known primarily from natural areas are assigned higher values). All indices compared in this study were calculated using vegetation data collected from equal-sized sampling grids stratified across seven prairie units. The units included remnants and plantings representing a wide range of habitat quality. The FQI and Mean C explained the most variation among sites and were most effective at distinguishing recognized qualitative differences indicating they can be more informative than traditional species-diversity measures in assessing floristic integrity within community types. The FQI and Mean C are applicable to both quantitative ecological monitoring and plotless survey methods.