concept

Ecological succession

The process by which a biological community assembles, develops and turns over through time after a disturbance. The old picture — Frederic Clements's, from the early twentieth century — treated succession as an orderly, deterministic sequence of stages climbing toward one fixed, climatically determined climax. Long-term fieldwork, above all at Mount St. Helens, overturned it: succession is actually stochastic and path-dependent, and need not converge on a single endpoint. The order of arrival, priority effects and the instability of the ground can all bend the whole trajectory.