One of the most fruitful areas for soil-ecological
research on colonisation processes is the giant
‘‘experiment’’ of brown-coal opencast mining
(Bradshaw and Hu¨ttl 2001; Bell 2001). It provides
a virgin soil substratum at a scale of square
kilometres. This allows the rare possibility of
investigating the development of the soil system
and its components, especially the soil fauna, from
time-point zero over a very long period. Irrespective
of the initial reclamation by man, such
observations deal with primary succession, since
these sites have not been previously influenced by a
community or by biogenic humus formation (Begon
et al. 1996; Dunger and Wanner 1999