Understanding disturbance and succession helps us as eco-farmers to use our management to “steer” our site into a direction of health, fertility and stability
As farmers and ranchers, we are all ecosystem managers. Whether our system regenerates the soil and the local ecosystem depends on what we actually do with and to our system and how those management decisions affect the process of ecological succession.
According to the AI definition du jour, ecological succession “is the process by which the composition of species within an ecological community gradually changes over time, typically progressing from a pioneer species to a more complex and stable ‘climax community’ following a disturbance or the creation of a new habitat.” Whether we are row croppers or graziers, what we do to interact with succession determines the health and fertility of our present and future resource base.
Let’s quickly review a simplified version of how ecological succession operates. At some point in time, there was some type of “disturbance” that created a starting point of ecosystem development. Let’s use the eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington as an example. There were places downwind from the eruption where volcanic ash (sand and gravel) was deposited six to 10 feet deep (the eruption of Novarupta volcano in Katmai National Park buried one valley over 600 feet deep in ash!). The ash was first colonized by the windblown seed of annual plants. At the same time, seed that had not been incinerated by the high temperatures also sprouted.
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