concept

Biological legacy

What survives in place after a catastrophe, and which determines the shape of the ecosystem that follows. After Mount St. Helens erupted, Jerry Franklin, Fred Swanson and colleagues found recovery was driven not by colonisation from outside but by what had lived through it on site: buried root systems, standing dead trunks, downed logs, seed banks under ash, animals that happened to be in burrows. The material a catastrophe leaves behind is not debris — it is the template the next forest is built on. The critical corollary: removing the legacies is worse than the disturbance was.