Both as a teacher and as an examiner, I regularly found ecology to be a subject that caused problems for students. For some, the problem resulted from poor recall. Students often confused the terms population and community or community and ecosystem. For others, the problem resulted from poor understanding. This was particularly true when students were asked to explain ecological succession. Recall and understanding are both part of assessment objective 1 (AO1), which makes up 30–35% of the marks in your final A-level biology examinations.
Ecological succession is the process by which communities change over time. Although some of the mature woodland communities that you might see in the UK today were planted, others are natural. They developed from previous communities. Each intermediate community in this development timeline is called a seral stage and the final mature community is called a climax community.
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