Impact of parthenium weed invasion on plants and their soil seedbank in a subtropical grassland, central Nepal

Jyoti Khatri-Chettri; Maan Bahadur Rokaya; Bharat Babu Shrestha

doi:10.5141/jee.21.00083

pISSN 2287-8327 eISSN 2288-1220

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Published online January 14, 2022
https://doi.org/10.5141/jee.21.00083

Journal of Ecology and Environment (2022) 46:02

Impact of parthenium weed invasion on plants and their soil seedbank in a subtropical grassland, central Nepal

Jyoti Khatri-Chettri¹ , Maan Bahadur Rokaya^2,3 and Bharat Babu Shrestha^1*

¹Central Department of Botany, Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu 44613, Nepal
²Institute of Botany, The Czech Academy of Sciences, Z?mek 1, 252 43 Pr?honice, Czech Republic
³Global Change Research Institute, The Czech Academy of Sciences, B?lidla 986/4a, 603 00 Brno, Czech Republic

Correspondence to:Bharat Babu Shrestha
E-mail bb.shrestha@cdbtu.edu.np

Jyoti Khatri-Chettri’s current affiliation is Trichandra Multiple Campus, Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu, Nepal.

Received: October 19, 2021; Revised: November 22, 2021; Accepted: November 23, 2021

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ The publisher of this article is The Ecological Society of Korea in collaboration with The Korean Society of Limnology

Abstract

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Abstract

Background: Parthenium hysterophorus L. (Asteraceae; hereafter Parthenium) is an invasive alien species of global significance because of its’ negative ecological and socioeconomic impacts. This species is spreading rapidly from lowland Tarai to Middle Mountain regions in Nepal. In the present study, we analyzed the impacts of Parthenium on plant community composition including their soil seedbank in subtropical grasslands located in central Nepal. Data was collected in a 10 m long transects passing through areas of high (> 90% cover), medium (40%-60%) and low (< 10%) levels of Parthenium cover using a plot of 1 m². Altogether, we sampled 90 plots in 30 transects. Seedling emergence method was used to estimate soil seedbank density in the soil samples (0-10 cm depth) collected from the plots with high Parthenium cover.
Results: There was no significant difference in the plant species richness at different levels of Parthenium invasion whereas there was a significant change in the species composition of above ground flora due to Parthenium invasion. There was also a significant difference in species composition between soil seedbank and aboveground flora in the highly invaded plots. Parthenium was the most dominant in soil seedbank, contributing 65% to the total soil seedbank.
Conclusions: Our study suggests that Parthenium has considerable negative impact on the native grassland flora, and the dominance of Parthenium in the soil seedbank means there is a challenge for its management. It also suggests the need of monitoring the soil seedbank dynamics while managing Parthenium weed.