Endangered plant species under differing anthropogenic interventions: how to preserve Pterygopleurum neurophyllum in Wondong wetland?

Endangered wetland plants are important as the potential keystone species and mediators for plant-soil interactions. Establishing conservation strategies for endangered plants is also prioritized because of the elevating extinction risk by human-induced wetland disturbances. The present study examined the factors controlling the incidence of Pterygopleurum neurophyllum, the endangered wetland plant experiencing severe habitat loss throughout Northeast Asia. Here, P. neurophyllum populations and their surrounding environments were addressed in the last natural Korean habitat to assess the possible influential factors (vegetation coverage, species richness, exotic plant species, coarse rock content, soil bulk density, and soil electroconductivity and pH) under anthropogenic wetland interventions (with or without soil disturbance). Our results showed that P. neurophyllum occurred 6 out of 32 plots in the study area. All P. neurophyllum were found in Miscanthus-dominated area, but preferred microhabitats featuring reduced vegetation coverage, increased species richness, and undisturbed soils under vegetation removal. Multimodel inference also indicated that vegetation coverage (relative importance = 1.00) and coarse rock content (relative importance = 0.70) were the major influential factors for P. neurophyllum population size, and the surviving P. neurophyllum were strictly limited to where both of them were kept lowered. Furthermore, the wetland intervention with soil disturbance had a negative effect on P. neurophyllum by creating the rocky and compacted soil surface as a result of land reclamation treatments. Conversely, the wetland intervention without soil disturbance enhanced the P. neurophyllum incidence by decreasing vegetation coverage of the overcrowding competitive plants. Overall findings reflect that the strategies to counteract habitat loss and manage the overly dense competitive plants should be necessary for conserving P. neurophyllum, as well as other wetland plants threatened by the human-induced disturbances and excessive competition intensities.