Dr. Sara Baer established the experimental restoration we used in this study in 1997. She created patches of reduced and enriched nitrogen and patches of reduced soil depth in order to test how increasing the heterogeneity (aka "patchiness") of essential resources for plants affected the diversity of species that established and thrived in this restoration. More recently, Ashley Wojciechowski added another element of patchiness by temporarily adding rainout shelters to some of the plots during the rainy growing season, inducing drought across one half of these plots. During the summer of 2021, we closely observed Andropogon gerardii (Big bluestem grass) in the plots to collect data on the dates that individuals progressed to each new stage in their perennial life cycle, from the first leaf all the way through to reproduction and death. We analyzed for differences in the timing of this progression between plots with different amounts of heterogeneity, and between the different subplot treatments (ie. enriched and reduced nitrogen, precipitation, and soil depth). We found that nitrogen enrichment changed the growth of A. gerardii, causing it to flower sooner. I find this result particularly interesting because it may affect the balance of asexual (clonal) reproduction and sexual (flowering) reproduction for this population of a highly dominant grass species.

We published our results in the open-access journal Ecosphere: you can read more about our study here!