Ecological Restoration Practices within a Semi-arid Natural Gas Field Improve Insect Abundance and Diversity during Early and Late Growing Season

SIMPLE SUMMARY: Land reclamation and ecological restoration are required to mitigate land surface disturbances associated with natural gas extraction in the western United States. Traditional focus on these lands has been to stabilize soil to prevent erosion, though more recently, there has been an emphasis on restoring ecosystem services. Insects provide numerous ecosystem services and can be considered indicators of success for ecological restoration projects. It has been suggested that creating spatial and temporal mosaics of flowering plants will be necessary for pollinator conservation. In this study, we found insect abundance to be significantly higher on sites undergoing restoration than in adjacent reference areas during early and late growing season within the Jonah Infill natural gas field in Sublette County, Wyoming, USA. Family richness was significantly higher on well pads in the late season compared to reference sites. While our study only looked at sites within the Jonah Infill and had limited scope in terms of seed mixes, our results are promising and suggest that further work be done to investigate the efficacy of flowering plants on increasing insect abundance and richness in future restoration projects associated with oil and natural gas development. ABSTRACT: Insects are critical components of terrestrial ecosystems and are often considered ecosystem engineers. Due to the vast amount of ecosystem services they provide, because statistically valid samples can be captured in short durations, and because they respond rapidly to environmental change, insects have been used as indicators of restoration success and ecosystem functionality. In Wyoming (USA), ecological restoration required on thousands of acres of land surface have been disturbed to extract natural gas. In this study, we compared early seral reclamation sites to reference areas at two points within a growing season. We compared insect abundance and family richness on 6 natural gas well pads with early season perennial forbs and 6 well pads with the late season to insect communities on adjacent reference areas. A total of 237 individual insects were found on early season reclaimed sites compared to 84 on reference sites, while 858 insects were found on late season reclaimed sites compared to 38 on reference sites. Insect abundance was significantly higher on reclaimed well pads compared to reference areas at both points in the growing season, while reclaimed sites had significantly higher Shannon Diversity Index in early season and significantly higher family richness in late season compared to their paired reference sites. We also found interesting differences in abundance at family levels.