Universities
Summary
Long-term data collected from an old-field community suggest that physical and environmental patterns alone may be insufficient to account for different patterns of succession. Using a simple Lotka–Volterra model to represent competition between early and late succession guilds, we add early and late consumer guilds to investigate if a herbivore effect can account for these differences. By including a herbivore effect, we find that succession can follow a variety of different paths, and need not move towards climax in an orderly or predictable way.
Methodology
Study plots were checked for plant composition twice early and then information was input into the model