Oak Success Under Pine: Plant-Soil Feedback Greenhouse Experiment: Soil and Root 16s rRNA
Oaks are an important component of the regional forests, but their dominance has declined partly due to poor regeneration under mature oak trees. Interestingly, oak regeneration success has been observed in adjacent red pine plantations. The mechanisms behind this phenomenon can help us develop a novelsilvicultural system that facilitates the gradual pine-to-oak successional transition, which hasecological and economical merits under predicted warmer conditions of the future: The Lake Statescurrently support the southernmost and northernmost distributions of red pine and oaks,respectively, suggesting that oaks will perform better than red pine in the future.Our goal is to investigate potential factors contributing to greater oak seedling success under red pine than oak, including biotic factors such as plant-soil feedback effects and competition with other tree species such as maple.