Help with analogy: Competition among similar species
Here are some definitions of interest to you

Ecological succession is the process of change in the species structure of an ecological community over time. The time scale can be decades (for example, after a wildfire), or even millions of years after a mass extinction.
A seral community (or sere) is an intermediate stage found in ecological succession in an ecosystem advancing towards its climax community. In many cases more than one seral stage evolves until climax conditions are attained.1 A prisere is a collection of seres making up the development of an area from non-vegetated surfaces to a climax community.
In biology, a disturbance is a temporary change in environmental conditions that causes a pronounced change in an ecosystem. [..]  Because of these and the impacts on populations, disturbance determines the future shifts in dominance, various species successively becoming dominant as their life history characteristics, and associated life-forms, are exhibited over time.
Ecological facilitation or probiosis describes species interactions that benefit at least one of the participants and cause harm to neither.1 Facilitations can be categorized as mutualisms, in which both species benefit, or commensalisms, in which one species benefits and the other is unaffected. Much of classic ecological theory (e.g., natural selection, niche separation, metapopulation dynamics) has focused on negative interactions such as predation and competition, but positive interactions (facilitation) are receiving increasing focus in ecological research.