Sand meadow A seasonally dry, seasonally wet to inundated, open, grass-, sedge-, moss-, and forb-dominated community that develops on level sandy-peaty soils of old glacial lake beds and outwash plains. The root zone remains moist, owing to a perched water table caused by impermeable silts or clay beneath the surface sands. The community usually occurs as small patches in gaps, or on the margins of, more extensive jack pine and/or Hill’s oak-dominated communities, or along game trails through Central Sedge Poor Fens. In pre-settlement times, this community might have been maintained by periodic catastrophic fires, or perhaps by the trails and wallows associated with the pre-settlement megafauna (e.g. elk, bison). Most extant EOs occur where anthropogenic disturbances such as trail, road, and railroad maintenance activities, or maintenance of mossing “platforms”, maintain small seral openings with vegetation scraped down to bare soil. The pioneering flora is composed almost entirely of native species, including a significant subset that are rare, uncommon, or otherwise noteworthy.
