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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]
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 ...
Connell, Joseph H. and Ralph O. Slatyer. “Mechanisms of succession in natural communities and their role in community stability and organization.” The American Naturalist 111 (982) (Nov. - Dec. 1977): 1119-1144. Moorcroft, Paul. “Terrestrial Succession.” Organismic and Evolutionary Biology 55. Maxwell Dworkin, Cambridge. 4 April 2011.
The principle of faunal succession, also known as the law of faunal succession, is based on the observation that sedimentary rock strata contain fossilized flora and fauna, and that these fossils succeed each other vertically in a specific, reliable order that can be identified over wide horizontal distances.
David Wilkinson gives a thorough history of the hypothesis in his paper titled, "The disturbing history of the intermediate disturbance". [2] In this paper, he explains that the idea of disturbance relating to species richness can be traced back to the 1940s in Eggeling 1947, [7] Watt 1947, [8] and Tansley 1949. [9]
An image of ecological succession, starting with pioneer species and ending with an old-growth forest that is dominated by climax species, which is denoted by VIII. Climax species, also called late seral , late-successional , K-selected or equilibrium species, are plant species that can germinate and grow with limited resources; e.g., they need ...
Secondary succession is the secondary ecological succession of a plant's life. As opposed to the first, primary succession, secondary succession is a process started by an event (e.g. forest fire, harvesting, hurricane, etc.) that reduces an already established ecosystem (e.g. a forest or a wheat field) to a smaller population of species, and as such secondary succession occurs on preexisting ...
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 .