"... A is the area of a newly-formed landscape in front of a glacier, which was recently ice covered but has since been exposed by glacier retreat ... There are several fundamental advantages of using glacier forelands as field laboratories for ecological purposes. First, their restricted physical size facilitates comprehensive investigation. Second, with a relatively severe climatic environment, they support relatively simple ecosystems. Third, recently-deglaciated terrain has experienced only a short history of modification by changing natural environmental processes. Last, but by no means least, with increasing distance from a retreating glacier, a longer time period has been available for ecosystem development: hence the pattern of ecosystems on the glacier foreland is commonly interpreted as a spatial representation of temperate changed as a vast natural experiment."