Plant Succession

Forests and vegetated land are frequently stripped bare by natural calamities such as floods and earthquakes, or by human activities such as fire, over-grazing and tree-felling — yet, given time, such a barren area is almost always re-colonised by plants and gradually restored to fertility. This gradual, orderly replacement of one plant community by another on the same site is called plant succession. The very first plants to colonise a barren area are called pioneers; the series of intermediate plant communities that follow, one replacing the next, are called seral communities; and the final, stable community that eventually establishes itself is called the climax community, with that final stage itself termed the climax. The sub-sections that follow work through why succession happens, what characterises i …