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 wits 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 all 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 Lip this special issue.