Grassland seed bank and community resilience in a changing climate

Plant dispersal and persistence strategies play an increasingly important role in the face of changing climate. Evaluating the restoration potential of soil seed banks as an important component of community resilience is crucial for developing effective grassland conservation and restoration strategies under climate change. Soil seed banks can act as a source for vegetation recovery by preserving species and supporting their establishment by assisting persistence and recolonization. In a systematic review of field and experimental seed bank studies, we evaluated the potential of seed banks in buffering climatic extremities and fluctuations. We found 42 papers testing the first-order (temperature and precipitation changes) and second-order effects of climate change (flooding and fire) on the seed bank in grasslands. We showed that persistent seed banks can support passive restoration especially in wetlands and habitats where unpredictable and frequent disturbance was typical in the historical timescale. We found that active restoration by seed addition will be most important in less disturbance-adapted habitats characterized by species with transient seed banks. In such cases, the introduction of native matrix species that can tolerate the predicted climatic change should be prioritized at degraded sites.