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Publisher
Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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Authors: Guillaume Decocq
Publish Date: 2006
Volume: , Issue: , Pages: 254-266
Abstract
Vegetation dynamics has long been studied from a deterministic perspective leading to important concepts like climax equilibrium and reversibility In recent decades the emergence of the theory of chaos has changed our vision of natural laws New concepts such as nonequilibrium heterogeneity disturbance and irreversibility have increasingly become popular Some ecological successions have even been considered as stochastic and thus their outcome a matter of chance Here I briefly review these three paradigms within the special framework of vegetation typology and conservation ecology I conclude that all successions are at least partly deterministic The proportion of stochasticity depends mainly on the size and composition of the regional species pool and is likely to occur in earlysuccessional stages When the lack of acute disturbance allows a succession to develop the latesuccessional stages usually converge toward a ‘strange attractor’ ie the climax Shortterm and/or smallscale monitoring are common biases leading to conclude that determinism does not exist in plant community successions
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