Forest succession experiment @ Pau!and

How to simulate the next generation of a forest?
We know that if there is a forest, pine tree will always be the first to grow.
It is a kind of pioneer species.
And then other kinds of species, for example, hardwood will grow under these pine trees.
At last there will replace the role of pine trees and become the dominant species in the forest.
But how can we proof this? Not only based on the observation.

We can simulate it in a simple way.
It's quite easy to understand the strategy of this experiment.
First of all, we need to see what kind of species is there in our forest.
Pick up a dominant species, and see what kind of seedling will it grow under this tree.

You can see there is a cutting wood here, and for this gap in the forest are some seedlings.

Seedlings between gap and the dominant species.

Second, we can count how many percentage of seedling species are there under a tree.
Then we can calculate the next generation of different kinds of species based on what we observe.(to make some repeat model help us to precise our data)
At last we can make a model for the generations of a forest.

Table of the seedlings we observe in the forest

We can type any thing we want for our modle

There's the result, you can see that hornbeam will be the dominant species whether pine tree is the pioneer species in the first year.

We won't know how exactly it will be in the future because we can't live for so long, and we haven't put any environmental effect in it.
But this helps us on managing a forest. What should we plant, or even what should we do to reach our goal? What are they going to be after 10 years? Or rather 100 years? We can speculate it! 

This is the mark to distinguish it is an experiment forest or artificial forest.

photo of experiment

What else do you think of this method?
Is there any way for us to precise our result?
Contact me if you have any idea: paul610478lin@hotmail.com