Gracie Baker
IUUR STEM Summer Research Program
Major: Biology
Mentors: Jen Lau, Mackenzie Caple, and Guillaume Dury
The emergence of Brood X cicadas will result in a sharp increase of nitrogen availability in the environment, also known as a resource pulse. While a past study showed that 17-year periodical cicadas have the ability to increase nitrogen content and fitness of understory forest plants, the impacts of resource pulses on evolution, population demography, and plant community composition are still unknown. One line of inquiry focuses on a nitrogen pulse’s ability to serve as a window for invasive species to become dominate in an ecosystem. In our experiment, we will be determining the percent cover of native and invasive species in plots supplemented with cicada carcasses and plots devoid of cicada carcasses. My hypothesis is that invasive species will out compete native species for the added nitrogen, resulting in cicada addition plots experiencing a greater increase in coverage by invasive species than the cicada removal plots.
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