Soil and vegetation patterns in barrier-island dune environments

Plant species distributions often have been attributed to landform characteristics or their associated geomorphic processes. This complicates interpretation of vegetation patterns in that geomorphic processes shape, and are shaped by, landforms. To characterize the biogeographic impacts of this interaction, I used principal components analysis (PCA) to examine hypotheses regarding the structure of variation among soil properties in active barrier-island dune systems. Dune soils and vegetation were sampled on two well-recognized barrier-island morphologies. On low-profile, wave-dominated microtidal barrier islands (South Core Banks, North Carolina) frequent overwash exerts a greater control on the distribution of soil properties. On mixed-energy mesotidal barrier islands (Sapelo Island, Georgia), overwash is less frequent, and the distribution of soil properties is shaped by a complex dune topography. Nontrivial principal components on both islands captured an equivalent amount of variance in the soil data. However, there were inter-island differences in the dimensionality of these nontrivial principal components, and differences in the distribution of variance and factor loadings. Suites of topography-modifying species, unique to each island, were uniform in the strength of their individual correlation with local edaphic variability. I posit that soil variance structure is a useful criterion to distinguish the relative influence on vegetation patterns of soil properties expressed through landforms (Sapelo Island) versus sediment transport processes (South Core Banks).