Ecosystem Succession and Nutrient Retention: Vitousek and Reiners' Hypothesis

What mechanisms mediate the flow of energy and cycling of nutrients during ecological succession? Are they linked in time and across space? In 1969, Eugene P. Odum proposed a series of hypotheses that caused the ecological community to think critically about patterns and processes (sensu Watt 1947) during ecological succession and how they might be linked in a causal manner. Odum’s perspective on the process of succession, or “the strategy of ecosystem development” as he termed it, was undoubtedly shaped by the intellectual influence of his mentor, Victor Shelford, as well as Shelford’s contemporaries such as Fredrick Clements. They shared the idea that ecological communities possessed emergent properties, wherein the whole is greater than the sum of its parts (sensu Phillips 1934). Inasmuch, the 24 hypotheses Odum (1969) articulated were an amalgam of holism and reductionism that created his rationale for the way energy flows and nutrients cycle within ecosystems. It is within this context that Peter Vitousek and Bill Reiners derived ideas that are fundamental to our understanding of energy flow and nutrient cycling in terrestrial ecosystems, ideas that have profoundly shaped my thinking as an ecologist.