ecotone

Every modification of climate, every disturbance of the soil, every interference with the existing vegetation of an area, favours some species at the expense of others. As Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker observed in Flora Indica (1855), all ecological communities are subject to some kind of disturbance, ranging from the simple, yet significant, loss of a tree to a catastrophic wildfire. Each disturbance creates an opportunity for a new species to colonize or flourish within the ecosystem in a process known as "ecological succession." Scientists refer to the area of overlapping landscapes where the "foreign" species encounter each other and blend together as ecotones, an apparent allusion to the tension created when competing species come together (in Greek tonos means "tension").