CAREER: Resolving drivers of variation in grassland community assembly and restoration

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The destruction and modification of natural ecosystems for human land uses, like agriculture, together pose the greatest threat to the world's biodiversity. In turn, ecological restoration has been hailed as a critical conservation tool for its ability to promote biodiversity through the repair of damaged ecosystems and creation of new habitats. Yet, restoration outcomes are notoriously unpredictable and this hinders land managers' abilities to reliably repair damaged ecosystems. This project will evaluate the causes of variation in restoration outcomes by investigating the process of community assembly - how assemblages of species develop over time - during restoration. In doing so, it will guide restoration practice, advance the field of restoration ecology through the coupling of basic ecological theory and ecosystem management, and test long-standing, fundamental questions about why the diversity and composition of ecological communities vary among locations. Furthermore, this project will train new restoration scientists and strengthen linkages between restoration research and practice through classroom instruction, student and postdoc training, and partnerships with land management agencies conducting restoration.This project will take place within a system of prairie grasslands restored through the sowing of native prairie seeds onto former agricultural lands. A goal of this work will be to understand how community assembly and restoration outcomes are influenced by environmental conditions that vary in space and time (soil fertility and rainfall), and as a function of two factors describing ecological communities - the number of species and number of individuals for each species, within communities. Focal questions will be evaluated experimentally and across a network of large-scale grasslands undergoing restoration, forging a link between mechanism-oriented experiments and real-world assembled ecosystems.