Temporal Patterns in Herbaceous Layer Communities of the North Carolina Piedmont
This chapter explores variations in and dynamics of herb layer assemblages across the North Carolina Piedmont landscape. It focuses on three questions: (1) What are the key environmental factors influencing herb distributions at various stages in the succession following land abandonment? (2) What do these patterns tell us with respect to the mechanisms that underlie the dynamics of herb populations? (3) Are Piedmont forest herbaceous communities changing in ways not related to old-field plant succession? To address these questions, the chapter draws on several strands of research carried out over the last 80 years to provide a more comprehensive picture of the successional patterns and mechanisms of change in herb-layer communities of the forested landscapes of the Piedmont region of North Carolina.
