You are working at a forest field site in Central Minnesota….
You are working at a forest field site in Central Minnesota. Your field site experiences severe heat waves, and increasingly severe heat waves with climate change. One year, there is a lightning storm that causes a large fire to burn down the forest where you work. All aboveground biomass at your field site is burned. In the years following this large fire, we might expect to see certain types of vegetation colonize and grow. In fact, we might expect a regular series of events or species. There are two types of succession that we identified in class (primary and secondary succession). There are also three mechanisms of succession that touch on other concepts that we learned in class this semester (facilitation, inhibition, and tolerance). Use this language to identify which type of succession is occurring (and why), and use each of these three mechanisms of succession to describe one potential transition in this process. For example for “facilitation”, you would identify a stage when you think that might be occurring, what is happening in the environment that makes you think that, and what the consequences for that would be in terms of the species growing there.