Testing general theory using successional systems

Most of ecology and evolutionary biology, both applied and basic, has benefited from research in successional systems. Such transitory model systems provide readily available, easily manipulated, and tractable universes in which to tackle general questions of broad interest to science. Regardless of whether you are interested in genes, physiology, or food webs, whether interested in microbes, macrobes, or chemical elements, whether interested in behavior of individuals, populations, community dynamics, trophic interactions, ecosystem fluxes, restoration, or toxicology, successional systems have contributed to your area of interest. For this talk, I will focus on a suite of studies that highlight the general utility of successional systems. While I will mention in passing the most famous of these studies, I will instead focus on works whose enormous value may be less likely to appear in text books, and therefore be somewhat less well known. Research areas will include ecological and evolutionary topics, behavior, populations, communities and ecosystems, terrestrial and aquatic systems, and both theory and empirical contributions.