Vegetation dynamics and dynamic vegetation science

This contribution presents a review of the development of the study of vegetation dynamics since 1979, in the framework of a jubilee meeting on progress in the study of vegetation. However, an exhaustive review is both impossible and unnecessary. It is impossible within the few pages available because of the vast literature published, and it is unnecessary because there are several review papers and textbooks available. To start with the year 1979 itself, two important papers appeared (White 1979; Huston 1979), and a symposium on advances in vegetation science was held in Nijmegen (Van der Maarel 1980a,b). Further publications consulted for this paper include Pickett & White (1985), Pickett et al. (1987), Gray et al. (1987), Burrows (1990), Van Andel et al. (1993), Glenn-Lewin et al. (1992) and Agnew et al. (1993). In 1979 a similar special meeting was held (Werger 1979), where I contributed with a review-like paper on numerical methods in vegetation science. Since this important aspect of vegetation science was not covered at this jubilee meeting, some developments of this branch have been included here, mainly so far as they apply to vegetation dynamics. Since I am involved in one particular branch of vegetation dynamics, i.e. gap dynamics, extra attention will be paid to recent work in Uppsala, perhaps at the expense of other new developments.