EIU Media Relations

EIU Professor Receives Grant for Ground-Breaking Study on Weeds

If Scott Meiners has his way, out-of-control weeds like kudzu and garlic mustard could eventually become relics of the past.

Meiners, a biological sciences assistant professor at Eastern Illinois University, is heading up research of weeds – known by scientists as “exotic plants” – in a study that has been ongoing for more than 45 years, making its data very useful.

The research project, called the Buell-Small Succession Study, is considered important enough that it recently received a highly sought-after grant of $229,521 from the National Science Foundation. The money will fund five years of work with graduate and undergraduate students.

The goals are to better understand the causes of plant invasions so that they may be better controlled and to understand the impacts of invasions.

When weeds move in, “nobody really notices it’s a problem until too late,” Meiners said, citing the south’s kudzu problem as an example. “Exotic species cost billions of dollars every year. There’s a ton that’s spent just on removal. It is a growing concern.”

Meiners first sampled the fields as a student in 1995. One of his dissertation advisers led the study before passing the reins to Meiners.

Each July, Meiners and his team travel to New Jersey to the approximately 100-acre study area, started in 1958 as bare ground adjacent to an old-growth forest. The ground had previously been in production, mostly of corn and soybeans. For study purposes, it is divided into plots of 1 square meter each.

“It’s a good model system,” Meiners said. “I think we have a rare opportunity to do a lot of really detailed things that other places can’t do because of the short time period (of their studies).”

Since the study began, the land has been invaded by “all different types of species,” he said. Some species, such as garlic mustard, are the same ones that are affecting Illinois now.

When he first got involved at the study site 10 years ago, the density and diversity of vegetation was greater, making it more difficult to count the number of plants. Now, the plants are thinning out, due in part to a once-a-century drought in 1999, which opened up the forest canopy and changed the dynamics of the system, he said. It is basically becoming a closed-canopy forest with an open understory.

The information that is being collected is general enough that it could be studied in many different ways, he said. “It’s such a cool data set that it’s kind of embarrassing that more has not been done with it.”

Meiners would like to write a book on the study in a couple of years, when the study marks its 50th anniversary. He also plans to develop educational resources.

For more information on the Buell-Small Succession Study, visit its Web site at www.ecostudies.org/bss.