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Long-term studies of secondary succession and community assembly in the prairie-forest ecotone of eastern Kansas, Hay meadow restoration experiment

Local and regional-scale processes interact to govern the assembly, diversity and functioning of ecological communities. Evaluating the interplay of these differently-scaled processes in the regulation of ecological systems is a challenging problem, but is crucial towards understanding and predicting the potential effects of accelerated human activity on biological diversity and ecosystem sustainability. Since 2000, two long-term field experiments have been underway in grasslands of eastern Kansas to investigate the interplay of soil resource availability, species interactions and regional processes governing plant secondary succession, community assembly, biodiversity, and ecosystem functioning. Both experiments involve manipulations of soil nutrients in permanent grassland study plots and employ multi-species seed addition treatments to evaluate the contribution of dispersal limitation and regional constraints on local species pools to the regulation of plant community dynamics. Hay meadow restoration experiment, previously funded by USDA, was established in 2000 in a section of the field that was left unplowed at the start of the experiment. Thus Experiment 2 was initiated in the context of secondary succession on recently abandoned cool-season hayfield where hay grass species were dominant at the start of the study. In this experiment we have been monitoring plant community change annually since 2001 in response to two aspects of hay management important in our area: annual fertilization and annual haying. The experimental design involves factorial manipulations of nutrient supply (two levels of NPK fertilization), annual haying (two levels: hayed; not hayed) and propagule input achieved by adding seeds of 41 native prairie species to half of the plots. Experiment 2 parallels Experiment 1 with manipulations of soil resources and species pools, but does so in the contexts of hay management and native prairie hay meadow restoration.