Researcher ORCID Identifier

0009-0006-6186-3960

Graduation Year

2026

Document Type

Campus Only Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Environmental Analysis

Reader 1

Diane Thomson

Reader 2

Findley Finseth

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2025 Toni A Coria

Abstract

In the face of anthropogenic climate change, stressors such as altered fire and rainfall regimes are disrupting demographic processes of native plant species in southern California. Artemisia californica is a dominant perennial plant of California Mediterranean-climate shrubland. This species can serve as a study system to understand the effects of non-native plants and seasonal rainfall patterns on seedling emergence, providing insight into how population dynamics might change in the face of climate change. The present study builds on a four‑year experiment conducted between 2014 and 2017 to test whether non‑native grass removal facilitates recovery of A. californica populations following a fire. Early results found that removal treatments promoted post-fire re-establishment even during drought years, but the longer-term effects of removal and of higher rainfall years remain unclear. To build upon this research and address these gaps, we analyzed additional years of data to further assess the effects of rainfall on seedling emergence. We also mapped seedlings and adult plants and analyzed patterns of clustering to evaluate the importance of plants establishing immediately after the fire for longer-term recruitment. Our results show significant positive relationships for both spring and fall rainfall and estimated A. californica emergence. Our spatial analyses show that A. californica seedlings demonstrate significant clustering with other seedlings and with adults that established during the first four years after fire. This finding supports the conclusion that important legacy effects remain from the non-native removal experiment, up to eight years after removal ended. This investigation contributes to our understanding of population dynamics in A. californica, supporting the importance of both seed availability and rainfall on recruitment.

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