Plant succession is the sequential change in species composition following a disturbance. Natural and human-caused disturbances are ubiquitous and increasingly destructive. Therefore, understanding plant succession is fundamental to ecology and to the development of resilient communities. Research frontiers include examining how disturbances interact, how succession integrates all scales of ecological time, how spatial patterns drive succession, and the influence of biological legacies and species’ functional traits and interactions on successional trajectories.
Landslides are intriguing, common examples of disturbance that provide spatially heterogeneous templates for plant succession. They typically are caused by other disturbances such as glacial melting, earthquakes, rainfall, road construction, and over-grazing. Landslides are geological disturbances that alter soil profiles, re-distribute carbon and nutrient pools, and create gaps in background vegetation that can lead to changes in biodiversity. They therefore influence ecological processes at long-term (geological) time scales but also provide examples of processes at intermediate (successional) and short-term (nutrient flux) scales. In addition, the frequently close association of landslides with humans makes them excellent templates to manipulate succession in desired directions (restoration) to increase stability, accelerate soil development, improve biodiversity, and, ultimately, to achieve environmental resiliency in our rapidly changing world.