Background and rationale
There are natural and anthropogenic disturbances occurring within the boreal forest. Increasing populations are driving increased pressures on the ecosystem services through various land uses. Anthropogenic disturbances are often caused by extracting valuable resources, such as lumber or oil and gas. These disturbances result in damaged or destroyed ecosystems with impaired ecosystem function and composition. Therefore, restoring landscapes to a similar state prior to disturbance is required to balance intensive land use and enhance the practice of sustainability.
The presence of native species is a key objective for reclamation of industrial sites (ESRD 2013). Reforestation with the inclusion of herbaceous species has the potential to interact with the community vegetation and suppress undesirable species. However, seeding herbaceous species is challenging with a lack of available native plant seed and limited success of plant establishment. Planting native herbaceous seedlings is a more reliable approach to reduce the dominance of undesirable species. Since this approach would be costlier, co-growing a woody and herbaceous species in the same container, or hitchhiker seedlings, could counterbalance this cost as well as develop mutualistic plant interactions. |