"I am working at Cedar Creek Ecosystem Reserve this summer, an LTER (Long-Term Ecological Research) site maintained by the University of Minnesota College of Biological Sciences. As a part of my internship, I have just finished collecting 576 soil core samples from 24 different abandoned agricultural fields. The samples will be used to examine how prescribed burning and field age might affect soil respiration rates and response to biotic and abiotic factors. It has been super interesting to observe the differences between recently abandoned agricultural fields and fields that have been left alone for 100 years (and everything in-between). I feel very lucky to spend my days in beautiful oak savannas/prairies and have been getting lots of use out of Merlin Bird ID and Seek, looking up all the new birds and wildflowers I'm surrounded by! In one of the pictures, we are surrounded by thousands milkweed plants. This field was abandoned in 2018 and remains incredibly sandy and infertile, but the milkweed doesn't mind. The whole site smelled amazing and was buzzing with pollinators. Visible in another picture, we were sampling in a field well on its way to a restored oak savanna landscape."