Virgo, Nathaniel, Richard Law, and Mark Emmerson. “Sequentially assembled food webs and extremum principles in ecosystem ecology.” Journal of Animal Ecology 75, no. 2 (2006): 377-386.
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Species rarely, if ever, arrive simultaneously at a given site; they are much more likely to appear sequentially from a regional pool of species, either one at a time or in small groups. When new species arrive, they may or may not become established. If they do establish themselves, they may then lead to extinction of resident species, so that a gradual change in species composition takes place as time goes on. This turnover of species, referred to here as assembly dynamics (Law 1999), is the stuff of succession, a subject as old as ecology itself (McIntosh 1985: 79 et seq.), and at the heart both of community ecology and of ecosystem ecology