100 yr of primary succession highlights stochasticity and competition driving community establishment and stability

The study of community succession is one of the oldest pursuits in ecology. Challenges remain in terms of evaluating the predictability of succession and the reliability of the chronosequence methods typically used to study community development. The research of William S. Cooper in Glacier Bay National Park is an early and well-known example of successional ecology that provides a long-term observational data set to test hypotheses derived from...