BRAINCAKESecondary Succession
Secondary succession is succession on land where a community has been removed or destroyed but the soil remains. Examples include land cleared by a forest fire, a flood, tree felling, or farmland that has been abandoned.
Because soil is already present, secondary succession does not need the slow pioneer stage of lichens and mosses weathering rock. The soil already contains:
• nutrients and humus
• seeds, spores and roots or rhizomes that survived
• decomposers and soil organisms
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Key terms in this lesson
- climax community
- The final, stable community reached at the end of succession, which does not change further under the prevailing conditions.
- seral stage
- One of the sequence of communities that replace each other during succession, from pioneer species to the climax community.
- biodiversity
- The number of different species living in an area, sometimes also considering how evenly individuals are distributed among them.
- biomass
- The mass of living material in an organism or trophic level, representing the chemical energy stored in its organic compounds.
More in Ecosystems
- Nitrification and Denitrification
- The Carbon Cycle
- Succession
- Primary Succession
- Deflected Succession
- Sampling Distribution and Abundance
- Quadrats and Transects
- Measuring Abiotic Factors in the Field
All 21 lessons in Ecosystems · All OCR A-level Biology topics