We visited the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in Michigan in October 2023. We learnt about succession and that there are five stages: beach, active dunes, shrub zone, pine/oak forest and beech/maple forest.
At the beach stage, there are not many plants due to hard wind.
In active dune stage lots of wind makes it hard for plants to grow.
Shrub zone tends to be the “old” dunes. There are more of abiotic factors.
Pine/oak forest is a type of forest that will remain stable as long as there is no human intervention or a natural disaster.
Beech/maple forest is the last stage of succession.
We can use this information in school in some presentations, in future when we have our own lives or maybe when we have our career with forests in the future, we have the base of the knowledge.
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