Cedar Creek Revisited: 100 Year of Old Field Succession

Adam CLARK (Graz): The old field experiment at Cedar Creek in central Minnesota, USA, is one of the largest and longest running grassland successional studies on earth. In total, observations have been running for almost 40 years, and cover roughly a century of succession. In 2022, we conducted the 9th resurveying of the experiment, including some of the first long-term data on burning effects at the site, and extended records on some of the "younger" fields in the chronosequence. These results suggest that overall diversity in the system is beginning to decline - and in particular, that newly abandoned fields are on low-diversity trajectories that are unlikely to converge to those observed in older fields in the region. In the talk, I will present the newest data from the experiment, and discuss some potential drivers of these patterns.