Q.Why does secondary succession generally proceed faster than primary succession?
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Start your 14-day free trial to unlock the full solution →Step 1. Primary succession must begin entirely from bare substrate with no soil present at all, meaning that fertile soil first has to be built up gradually through the physical weathering of parent rock combined with the slow accumulation of organic matter from the earliest colonising organisms -- a process that alone can take hundreds or thousands of years. Step 2. Secondary succession, by contrast, begins on a site where an existing community has been destroyed or removed, but where the soil has NOT been destroyed along with it, and where a bank of dormant seeds, roots or other propagules left over from the earlier community frequently survives as well. Step 3. Because the single slowest and most time-consuming requirement of primary succession -- building soil up from nothing -- has already been met before secondary succession even begins, and because ready sources of propagules are often already present to …
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