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Concept
Climax community
Summary
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 composed of species best adapted to average conditions in that area. The term is sometimes also applied in soil development. Nevertheless, it has been found that a "steady state" is more apparent than real, particularly across long timescales. Notwithstanding, it remains a useful concept.
The idea of a single climax, which is defined in relation to regional climate, originated with Frederic Clements in the early 1900s. The first analysis of succession as leading to something like a climax was written by Henry Cowles in 1899, but it was Clements who used the term "climax" to describe the idealized endpoint of succession.
Clements described the successional development of an ecological communities comparable to the ontogenetic development of individual organisms. Clements suggested only comparisons to very simple organisms. Later ecologists developed this idea that the ecological community is a "superorganism" and even sometimes claimed that communities could be homologous to complex organisms and sought to define a single climax-type for each area. The English botanist Arthur Tansley developed this idea with the "polyclimax"—multiple steady-state end-points, determined by edaphic factors, in a given climatic zone. Clements had called these end-points other terms, not climaxes, and had thought they were not stable because by definition, climax vegetation is best-adapted to the climate of a given area. Henry Gleason's early challenges to Clements' organism simile, and other strategies of his for describing vegetation were largely disregarded for several decades until substantially vindicated by research in the 1950s and 1960s (below).
Official source
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Ontological neighbourhood
Related publications (35)
Ecosystem engineering by periphyton in Alpine proglacial streams
Tom Ian Battin, Davide Mancini, Marc Aguet, Adrijan Selitaj, Matteo Roncoroni
Stream periphytons are candidate ecosystem engineers in proglacial margins. Here, we quantify the extent to which they are engineers for the case of hillslope-fed tributaries in the terrace zones of proglacial margin alluvial plains. Candidate ecosystem en ...
WILEY2023Quantifying the effects of rainfall temporal variability on landscape evolution processes
Lausanne, Quartier Centre, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland Rainfall characteristics such as its intensity, duration, and frequency are key determinants of the hydro-geomorphological response of a catchment. The presence of non-linear and threshold effects ma ...
2023Limited role of soil texture in mediating natural vegetation response to rainfall anomalies
Evidence suggests that the response of rainfed crops to dry or wet years is modulated by soil texture. This is a central tenet for certain agronomic operations in water-limited regions that rely on spatial distribution of soil texture for guiding precision ...
2022Related people (13)
Related concepts (5)
Ecological succession
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. Succession that begins in new habitats, uninfluenced by pre-existing communities, is called primary succession, whereas succession that follows disruption of a pre-existing community is called secondary succession.
Habitat
In ecology, habitat refers to the array of resources, physical and biotic factors that are present in an area, such as to support the survival and reproduction of a particular species. A species habitat can be seen as the physical manifestation of its ecological niche. Thus "habitat" is a species-specific term, fundamentally different from concepts such as environment or vegetation assemblages, for which the term "habitat-type" is more appropriate. The physical factors may include (for example): soil, moisture, range of temperature, and light intensity.
Temperate rainforest
Temperate rainforests are rainforests with coniferous or broadleaf forests that occur in the temperate zone and receive heavy rain. Temperate rainforests occur in oceanic moist regions around the world: the Pacific temperate rainforests of North American Pacific Northwest as well as the Appalachian temperate rainforest of the Eastern U.S.