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What are Early-Successional Habitats?
Succession is the gradual replacement of one plant community by another. In a forested ecosystem, tree cover can be temporarily displaced by natural or human disturbance (e.g., flooding by beaver, or logging). The open environments created by removal of tree cover often support very different plant species than a full-canopied forest. These open environments are generally referred to as ‘early-successional’ habitats because as time passes, trees will return. Thus, the open conditions occur ‘early’ in the sequence of plant communities that follow disturbance.
This meadow at MassWildlife's Hop Brook Wildlife Management Area in Tyringham is just one example of an early-successional habitat. In the absence any disturbance, either natural of manmade, this meadow would eventually succeed to forest.
As an example, consider natural disturbance by beaver. Typically, beaver will dam a small stream, and flood an area of mature forest along the stream. Trees within the beaver pond usually die and decay. Eventually, beaver abandon the dam, and the water drains away, creating a wet meadow where a forest once stood. Over time, the meadow dries, and is invaded by woody shrubs and trees. Over the course of decades, the forest returns-at least until beaver re-colonize the area!
The open wet meadow and shrub communities that follow the beaver pond are early-successional habitats. This term is also applied to other open communities that are self-perpetuating in the absence of human intervention, such as grasslands. In Massachusetts, coastal plain grasslands occurred naturally in some places (notably Cape Cod and the Islands). Periodic fire maintained these communities in an open, early-successional condition. Fire exclusion by humans allows woody vegetation to invade these habitats.
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