Response of Plant and Invertebrate Communities to Pothole Blasting in a Giant Cutgrass Marsh
Thousands of hectares of tidally-influenced, forested wetlands were cleared in the South Atlantic Coastal Zone and put into rice production during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Many of these ricefields were abandoned in the late 1800s and were not maintained thereafter; hence, they no longer have functional dikes and provide poor habitat for waterfowl and wading birds due to colonization by dense stands of giant cutgrass (Zizaniopsis miliacea). Because efforts to open these extensive stands with herbicides and fire have been largely unsuccessful, in April 1997 we used an...
