What is ecological succession?

Difference in ecological succession between the two environments?

• Please explain to me what difference there is in the ecological succession in the terrestrial environment vs. the succession in aquatic environments. Thank you.

• Answer:

  Syntheses of data across ecosystems indicate that aquatic and terrestrial food webs show unambiguous differences in their structure and function. Aquatic producers support more consumption and are regulated by top-down forces to a greater degree. Two categories of explanation for these patterns have been proposed. The first is that autotrophs in water and on land differ in size, allocation to different tissues, growth rate, chemical composition and nutritional quality. Evidence for these contrasts are compelling, and have profound implications for food-web structure which are just recently beginning to be explored. The second class of explanations is that systems differ in patterns of feeding links, their degree of trophic complexity, omnivory, defences and specialization. This is an intriguing suggestion, but one that has proven remarkably difficult to test. We argue that aquatic–terrestrial differences in the strength of top-down and bottom-up forces reflect variation in the selective constraints imposed on the producers. Differences due to food-web architecture and complexity are intriguing possibilities that remain to be tested.