What is status of plant recovery at the volcano 25 years after the eruption?
The first 25 years of vegetation recovery at Mount St. Helens can be viewed as the opening chapter in a long-term (200 to 500 year) successional sequence that, in the absence of another large-scale eruption or other disturbance, will eventually return the 1980 blast zone to an old-growth forest. During the first five years after the eruption, vegetation recovery was dominated by surviving plants that were rooted in pre-eruption soil and managed to sprout through the overlying deposits of volcanic ash and pumice.
