ABSTRACT
A climax community, or climatic climax community, is a community of plants and animals that, through the process of succession, has attained equilibrium with the local and regional environmental conditions. Frederic E. Clements (1916), by sharpening up ideas set down by Henry C. Cowles (1899), originated the idea of a single climatic climax, or monoclimax, associated with regional climate and representing the endpoint of succession. He believed each climatic type fosters a single climax-type, but recognized that other communities – he called them proclimax communities – exist that persist in states removed from the climatic climax for a particular area. He identified four such proclimax communities: subclimax (a long-lasting, penultimate stage of succession), disclimax or plagioclimax (caused by an environmental disturbance), preclimax (caused by drier or warmer conditions than the regional norm), and postclimax (caused by cooler or wetter conditions than the regional norm). However, he thought these communities were unstable, because by definition climax vegetation is best adapted to the climate of a given area (see Eliot 2007). Arthur Tansley extended Clement’s idea with the polyclimax in which several different climax communities could exist in an area with the same regional climate owing to differences in soil moisture, nutrient levels, fire frequency, and so on (e.g. Tansley 1939). The climax-pattern hypothesis (Whittaker 1953) was a variation on the polyclimax theme and saw natural communities adapted to all environmental factors, but with a continuity of climax types that grade into one another along environmental gradients, rather than forming discrete communities that change through very sharp ecotones.
