Patterns of Succession in Different Forest Ecosystems

Abstract

The next four chapters contain descriptions of the successional process in four materially different regions on the North American continent. It is by no means a description of all the forest types that occur on the continent, and there are some important omissions. All four of these studies are of forests dominated by evergreen trees throughout most of the successional sequences, and the deciduous forests of the upper Midwest—a region that was the professional birthplace of many of the early workers in plant succession—is unrepresented. This is an important omission because one thing that emerges from a study of the four articles presented here is that the ecology of the ecologists is an important determinant of their philosophy. The forest vegetation of an area as large as a continent can be remarkably different, and these differences color the thinking of the people who study the successional process in these different regions.KeywordsForest EcosystemRain ForestTropical Rain ForestForest SuccessionNorth American ContinentThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.