What did the soil nutrient and plant growth experiments show?
What stands out most was that the soil chemistry of the red and black soils were vastly different – soil nutrients were less abundant in the severely burned soils – for example, there was less organic carbon and less nitrogen and phosphorous. For the growth experiments, I grew three native and three non-native plant species in field collected samples of the red and black soils in a controlled growth chamber. This was a way to test if native or non-native plants had reduced growth in the red soil. The results were surprising – the non-native plants had reduced growth in the burned soils while the native plants did not show growth differences between the soils with different burn severities. This result was suprising because we initially hypothesized that the non-natives would be negatively influenced by the low abundance and diversity of soil microbes (especially arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi) in the red soil; we did not take into account how dependent non-native, invasive plant species
