Refugia within successional mosaics where localized conditions inhibit successional replacement may support large abundances of early colonizing species and their coexistence with strongly competitive late colonizers. Numerous habitats have been hypothesized as refugia from succession with important landscape-scale consequences from export of propagules, but their commonness among ecological systems is unknown because tests to demonstrate their existence have not been formulated and applied. In this study on an intertidal model system, an early successional tubeworm was highly abundant in a hypothesized refuge habitat-type where late successional algae could not establish. In adjacent non-refuge habitat, a change in species dominance involving tubeworms shifting to algae occurred from early to late succession following experimentally induced disturbance. No such change occurred in refuges where early successional tubeworm populations steadily increased throughout succession. Tubeworm recruitment was reduced in the presence of late successional algae, likely from competition in the non-refuge. The presence of habitats providing refugia from succession may have important consequences, e.g. promoting low but consistent levels of local-scale coexistence of early and late successional taxa observed here even without disturbance. Experimental tests such as these to identify refugia from succession will be useful to apply to larger-scale land/seascapes if, as in this study, the scale of experimentation is optimized for the species and processes of interest. If the inferences from these results are extrapolated to larger-scale systems, they may inform our understanding of spread of early successional species such as weeds with large impacts that are potentially influenced by this landscape feature.

局部条件抑制演替替换的演替镶嵌图中的避难所可能支持大量早期殖民物种及其与竞争激烈的后期殖民者共存。许多生境被假定为演替后的避难所，而繁殖体的输出则对景观产生了重要的景观影响，但由于尚未制定和证明其存在的试验，因此它们在生态系统之间的共性尚不清楚。在关于潮间带模型系统的这项研究中，早先演替的worm虫在假设的避难所栖息地类型中高度丰富，而晚继演藻无法建立。在邻近的非避难所栖息地 在实验诱发的干扰作用下，从早期到后期演替发生了涉及结核虫向藻类转变的物种优势。在避难所中没有发生这种变化，在避难所中，连续演替期间早期演替的结核虫种群一直稳定增长。在后期演替藻类的存在下，可能由于非避难所的竞争而减少了worm虫的募集。提供演替避难所的栖息地可能会产生重要后果，例如，即使在没有干扰的情况下，促进此处观察到的早期和后期演替类群的地方规模低并稳定的水平共存。如果像本研究中那样，进行诸如此类的实验测试以从继承中识别避难所，将有助于将其应用于更大规模的陆地/海景。实验规模针对感兴趣的物种和过程进行了优化。如果将这些结果的推论推算到更大的系统中，它们可能会有助于我们了解早期演替物种（例如杂草）的传播，这些杂草可能会受到该景观特征的重大影响。