Application of nested samples to study the soil seed bank in semiarid sandy grassland

Abstract

The aim of the present work was to study the soil seed bank of the semiarid sandy grassland community using the nested sampling procedure. The samples consisted of six concentric cores with diameters ranging from 5 to 22 cm and surface area ratio of the outermost to the innermost ring of 19. Investigations were directed to establish the minimum core diameter to find the dominant and less frequent species in the seed bank and also to have an insight on distribution patterns of species. The smallest core (diameter: 5 cm) employed in 20 repetitions was adequate to find the dominant species in the seed bank, while increasing the sample area to 19 times resulted in doubling the number of species found. The seeds of the dominant species had clustered distribution even at the smallest applied sample scale, while patterns of seed clumps followed different (uniform, contagious, random) distributions. © 2003 Akadémiai kiadó Budapest.