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Ecological succession [ edit ] In areas of major ecological disruption or sterilisation (such as after a major volcanic eruption, as at Krakatoa or Mount St. Helens ), r - and K -strategists play distinct roles in the ecological succession that regenerates the ecosystem .
Ecological succession is the process of change in the species that make up an ecological community over time. The process of succession occurs either after the initial colonization of a newly created habitat, or after a disturbance substantially alters a pre-existing habitat. [ 1 ]
In scientific ecology, climax community or climatic climax community is a historic term for a community of plants, animals, and fungi which, through the process of ecological succession in the development of vegetation in an area over time, have reached a steady state. This equilibrium was thought to occur because the climax community is ...
One example of primary succession takes place after a volcano has erupted. The lava flows into the ocean and hardens into new land. The resulting barren land is first colonized by pioneer organisms, like algae, which pave the way for later, less hardy plants, such as hardwood trees, by facilitating pedogenesis, especially through the biotic acceleration of weathering and the addition of ...
For example, we can examine succession in the Loess Plateau in China. In the graph on page 995 of the paper "Plant Traits and Soil Chemical Variables During a Secondary Vegetation Succession in Abandoned Fields on the Loess Plateau" by Wang (2002), we can see the initial dominance of the Artemisia scoparia, the pioneer species.
A seral community 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.
An ideal examples of r-selected groups are algae. Based on the contradictory characteristics of both of these examples, areas of occasional disturbance allow both r and K species to benefit by residing in the same area. The ecological effect on species relationships is therefore supported by the intermediate disturbance hypothesis.
Cyclic succession is a pattern of vegetation change in which in a small number of species tend to replace each other over time in the absence of large-scale disturbance. Observations of cyclic replacement have provided evidence against traditional Clementsian views of an end-state climax community with stable species compositions .