#ecotone

The endangered pine flatwoods salamander is dependent on not just longleaf pine flatwoods for adult living space, and vernal pools to breed in, but on there being a grassy ecotone between the two places that the salamanders can easily cross. If fires are suppressed, and brambles and oaks start growing up where the grass was, the salamanders have a hard time migrating to breed. And given there aren’t that many good breeding years in the first place... you get the idea. So how does this relate to worldbuilding?

On a pure physical world level, ecotones are like any other border feature; they can become a point of contention from both sides. An area that’s neither more water nor more trees can seem useless to a property owner who owns one of those, and they’re likely to try expanding their half into the muddled area.

(Here I’m going to note that this is a Bad Idea if you want long-term stable returns from what you’ve got. But there’s an amazing number of people for whom “long-term” means next week, not ten years from now.)

As we know from the internet, anything that can be argued over will be argued over. An ecotone makes a handy conflict source in your plot, whether large or small. In the right story, two neighbors duking it out over a grassy meadow and dragging in all their neighbors, allies, enemies, and innocent bystanders, can be just as dramatic as two nations going to war.

Though if you want that last, ecotones can be your thing, too. Different habitats mean different ways people make a living - and that means, people being people, conflicts over the One True Way to Live.

A classic ecotone in history for this conflict is the ever-shifting boundary between dry steppes and land watered enough to farm in Asia. People living in that ecotone were often merchants, traders, outcasts or oddballs from both sides. It didn’t take much to set off a brawl. And sometimes it didn’t take many brawls to set off Nomads Looting Everything or the Latest Chinese Empire Smiting Nomads.

(I really liked The Legend of Hua Mulan (2013); it got into a fair amount of this!)

One way to give stories life and breath is to wedge them into the cracks of history and what-if. Ecotones are one more place to start looking.