2016 Mentors and Projects

Postdoctoral Fellow (Restoration Ecology) Center for Conservation and Sustainable Development

Forest restoration effects on herbaceous plants at Shaw Nature Reserve, Missouri. Another of Reid’s current research interests is the effect of fire on plant communities. The pre-European Ozark Plateau landscape was frequently burned, and its plant communities are adapted to intermittent fires. As such, prescribed fire is commonly used as a restoration practice to increase species richness. In this project, the prospective student will draw on a 12-year database of annual herbaceous vegetation surveys to develop hypotheses about the influence of prescribed fire on particular plant abundance, interspecific interactions, or functional traits. The student will then test her/his hypotheses by sampling and analyzing data from an established set of thirty 50-m transects through a restored forest at Shaw Nature Reserve.