On the dynamics of vegetation: Markov chains as models of succession

An important problem in the study of successional change is the question whether succession is Markovian, or, in other words, whether a knowledge of past vegetation is necessary in order to predict the future vegetation of a site. One approach to this problem would be to perform perturbation studies on actual vegetation. Since experimental perturbations of most vegetation types are extremely time consuming, however, a test for the importance of historical effects which can be performed on observational data would be preferable. Such a test can be found in the theory of Markov processes. the statistical tests for testing the Markovity assumption and some additional applications of the theory to vegetation dynamics are discussed. Appropriate data, however, are hard to find and the data set used here can only illustrate some other applications of the Markov chain model. One salient conclusion is that, the classical conception to the contrary, ecological succession appears to be highly indeterminate. This clearly calls for a stochastic rather than a deterministic description.

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