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Developing strategies to sustainably manage landscapes to meet environmental, social, and economic goals is an increasing concern in a world experiencing anthropogenic global change. Here we evaluate how our game Resilience: After The Eruption, a digital role-playing simulation game, helps us answer the question of how to design serious games to facilitate understanding of complex sustainability issues. In a simulation of the aftermath of the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, players of Resilience: After The Eruption perform resource management and engage in stakeholder collaboration. Through pre- and post-gameplay surveys, we assessed user experience and whether players learn about the complexities of the natural and human phenomena that affect post-disturbance ecological recovery processes and experience the challenges of multiple-stakeholder cooperation. Players showed an overall increase in knowledge that corresponded to the desired learning objectives and generally reported a positive user experience. Our results support the idea that role-playing simulation games like Resilience: After the Eruption can be a useful tool for educating and training individuals on complex sustainability issues. 

Volcanic debris avalanches are among the largest and most severe disturbances known. Therefore, studying processes of ecosystem formation on the deposits emplaced by these landslides provides insights into the patterns of community assembly after the most severe disruptions. In this review we synthesize findings of 60 vegetation studies from 15 volcanic debris avalanche deposits. One of the most impactful drivers of the speed with which communities reestablish is the climatic region in which the debris avalanche occurs. The fastest recovery occurs in the tropics and slowest in the boreal latitudes. The existence of biotic legacies, or remnant soils or biota from the previous communities accelerates community establishment, and these legacies are found more frequently on smaller debris avalanche deposits. Where these legacies exist, recovery proceeds many times more rapidly than in primary successional areas of the deposits. Similar patterns across mountains are observed in the species guilds that arrive and become established on the deposits with nitrogen fixers and early seral species doing particularly well. Complete recovery, meaning that communities match those of surrounding undisturbed areas, from this extreme class of disturbance takes a very long time, decades in the tropics and centuries to millennia at higher latitudes. Secondary disturbances are frequent and often reshape the direction of community development. Understanding of community development on debris avalanches would be greatly expanded if continuous time series over decadal to millennial scales were available on more disturbances. This could be achieved through repeat monitoring of permanent plots, remote sensing, or use of pollen core analysis. Such studies may enable inference about whether long-lasting community differences from surrounding areas are due to alternative stable states or simply the slow turnover of long-lived species on volcanic debris avalanches. Further study of these topics will foster better management of human disturbed landscapes, such as those from large-scale mining.