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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 ...
A seral community is an intermediate stage found in an ecosystem advancing towards its climax community. In many cases more than one seral stage evolves until climax conditions are attained. [34] A prisere is a collection of seres making up the development of an area from non-vegetated surfaces to a climax community. Depending on the substratum ...
Connell and Slatyer chose to focus on autogenic succession, which occurs on newly exposed landforms and is initiated by changes from within the community rather than a geophysical transformation. [2] They targeted plant and immobile aquatic organisms that demanded the greatest surface area within an environment and could modify the physical ...
They are the opposite of pioneer species, also known as ruderal, fugitive, opportunistic or R-selected species, in the sense that climax species are good competitors but poor colonizers, whereas pioneer species are good colonizers but poor competitors. [5] Given the prevailing ecological conditions, climax species dominate the climax community.
Organisms whose life history is subject to r-selection are often referred to as r-strategists or r-selected. Organisms that exhibit r-selected traits can range from bacteria and diatoms, to insects and grasses, to various semelparous cephalopods, certain families of birds, such as dabbling ducks, and small mammals, particularly rodents.
Clements's climax theory of vegetation dominated plant ecology during the first decades of the twentieth century, though it was criticized significantly by ecologists William Skinner Cooper, Henry Gleason and Arthur Tansley early on, and by Robert Whittaker mid-century, and largely fell out of favor.
Primary succession is the beginning step of ecological succession where species known as pioneer species colonize an uninhabited site, which usually occurs in an environment devoid of vegetation and other organisms. In contrast, secondary succession occurs on substrates that previously supported vegetation before an ecological disturbance. This ...
Ecology considers organisms at the individual, population, community, ecosystem, and biosphere levels. Ecology overlaps with the closely related sciences of biogeography, evolutionary biology, genetics, ethology, and natural history. Ecology is a branch of biology, and is the study of abundance, biomass, and distribution of organisms in the ...