When a 10,000-year-old prairie is plowed up to plant corn or a savanna is consumed by a strip mall, these once-grassy expanses, if left to regrow, can eventually look vaguely like they did before.
But a growing body of research suggests that what comes back isn’t the same as what was lost, even decades later. And now scientists are starting to understand why.
That’s the takeaway of a new study of grasslands worldwide published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“What these findings suggest is that we need to be taking an active hand in grassland recovery — doing things like sowing seeds and transplanting — if we want secondary grasslands to function like the old-growth ones.” Brudvig said.