Why study succession? It is permanently challenging, especially now under global change

The post provided by Karel Prach, with a contribution by Tomáš Herben

This post refers to the article Species occurrence in successional series as field-based indicators of their disturbance niche by Tomáš Herben and Karel Prach, published in the Journal of Vegetation Science (https://doi.org/10.1111/jvs.70104)

Research on vegetation succession has been a key part of ecology for more than a century, and the current rapidly changing world offers new options for the research. Climate change, advancing eutrophication, and the increasing anthropogenic and natural disturbances are causing changes in vegetation and entire ecosystems that are often faster and sometimes different from those that we have so far encountered.

During the past time, a lot of information has been accumulated about the course of individual successional series, but only recently have some studies been published. They are comparing more series together at larger spatial scales, using quantitative or at least semi-quantitative methods, from national to subcontinental and global scales. This is a promising path for the next research. Understanding ecological succession is, among others, the basis for successful ecological restoration of disturbed ecosystems.

A short personal disclosure by Karel Prach: How did I get into succession research? Thanks to my master’s thesis supervisor Marcel Rejmánek, now professor at the University of California, who conceived extensive research on succession in abandoned fields in the Bohemian Karst near Prague. In my PhD thesis, I compared this secondary succession with the primary one on coal mining dumps, and considered comparing more successional series together. With the help of my students and colleagues, I have been gradually fulfilling this idea, and currently, we have detailed and comparable data from 21 different types of successions and from more than 40 individual series in our country (the Czech Republic). In recent years, we have also been trying to compare successions around the world, and we work with more than 500 studies. However, comparisons must only be tentative because this data is more difficult to compare.

A short personal comment by Tomáš Herben: I have never fully understood the bulldog tenacity with which Karel Prach (my older and respected colleague) has been collecting data on individual succession series. There is an important component of internal dynamics in all plant communities, so why to single out succession for the study? Moreover, observing succession pushes one, I tended to think, towards the Clementsian view of vegetation – there are certain succession stages, which follow each other (in succession 🙂 ), but with no good tools to peep into the process. I always tended to think that such data is too descriptive and cannot provide us with an understanding of the mechanisms of species interactions (which ultimately drive species change in succession). However, after a few decades, I had to yield – once such data have been collected, they could be used to ask wonderful questions at the species level, making use of the fact that they come from vegetation change in a well-defined time frame due to a well-defined disturbance event. This can provide us, among others, with sorely missing data on (Gleasonian!) species response to disturbance, which has largely been inferred from species growth forms and casual field observations, but rarely put on a firmer basis.

Since disturbances initiate succession, studying their intensity and frequency is essential for understanding successional changes. Since species respond to disturbances individually, it is reasonable to ask what their traits are and how they correlate with the intensity and frequency of disturbances. Thus, we have three basic components of the study of vegetation succession: a description of the vegetation changes themselves, the nature of the disturbances that trigger these changes, and the properties of the participating (or not participating) species. Of course, we cannot omit the other environmental factors, such as edaphic and climatic ones. We attempted to analyze together the first three components in our study (Herben and Prach 2026), which was conceived and written (in the end) as a kind of recreation work during several summer stays with our families.

Brief personal summary:

Karel Prach works at the Department of Botany at the University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice, Czech Republic. He has been studying succession at different places in the world and is active in using knowledge on vegetation succession for ecological restoration of human-made habitats, such as mine dumps or abandoned quarries.

Tomáš Herben works at the Department of Botany at Charles University in Prague; he is interested in plant community ecology and evolution of plant traits, with a specific interest in belowground traits.