The success of succession: a symposium commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Buell-Small Succession Study

Motivation: The Buell-Small Succession Study (BSS) is the longest running study of post agricultural succession in North America. To honor this program, a symposium at the Ecological Society of America meetings was organized to explore the state of succession theory and its contribution to the field of ecology and its application to restoration. The BSS was originally motivated by two controversies in the literature during the 1950’s. The first was between a community versus and individual basis of secondary succession. The second was the validity of the Initial Floristic Composition hypothesis. Location: Hutcheson Memorial Forest, Somerset, New Jersey, USA Methods: Vegetation composition and cover has been continuously quantified in permanent plots established in 10 old fields. Continued Research Motivation: The rich data set has documented population and community dynamics and the spatio-temporal controls and historical contingencies that influence those dynamics. The regulation of community dynamics continues to be a line of inquiry as does the application of results to restoration and understanding the dynamics of non-native species. Conclusions: Long term vegetation studies are uncommon in ecology yet they are uniquely valuable for understanding system dynamics – particularly if the studies capture periodic events or system shifts such as droughts and invasions by non-native species. Resilient long term studies, of which the BSS is an example, maintain methods and data structure while allowing motivating questions to evolve along side advancements in the theoretical and conceptual realms of the field. Succession continues to serve as a basic tenet of ecology which is demonstrated by the papers making up this special issue. The year 2006 marks the 50th anniversary of the Buell-Small Succession Study (BSS) at the Hutcheson Memorial Forest in Somerset, New Jersey. The BSS is the longest continuous study of post-agricultural succession inNorthAmerica. It serves not only as amodel for the development of succession theory in ecology, but also as a demonstration of the importance of long term research for understanding ecological dynamics. The BSS research on ecological succession was initially motivated by the need to test a theoretical debate occurring in the field of ecology in the 1950s. Theory continues to motivate the BSS. Over the course of the past 50 years the old field system itself has changed and so has the landscape context of the site. This has created continuing opportunities for scientific inquiry. To honor the BSS program, the scientists who initiated it, and the legion of Rutgers University students that have sampled the site each year, a symposium at the Ecological Society of America Annual Meetings of 2007 in San Jose, California was organized by the current leaders of the BSS (Meiners, Pickett, Cadenasso, and Morin). The charge of the symposium was to explore how the theory of ecological succession has progressed, articulate what we have learned through the application of our knowledge to restoration, and synthesize the field to arrive at generalizations applicable across systems and scales. The collection of papers to follow developed from this symposium. Because the BSS provided themotivation for the symposium and many contemporary plant ecologists have contributed to this study, we briefly review the history of the BSS and its contribution to understanding secondary successional dynamics. Motivation for the Buell-Small Succession Study Plant community succession is one of the most ubiquitous of ecological processes. The change in structure and species composition of assemblages of plants after physical disturbances, or after release from agricultural management, has been used to generate and test many foundational concepts and theories of ecology. Indeed, the founding of the Applied Vegetation Science 12: 3–8, & 2008 International Association for Vegetation Science 3