A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1367 entries
sere
A sere is the whole sequence of communities that replace one another on a site over time: bare rock to lichen to moss to herb to shrub to woodland, or open water to reedbed to fen to carr. Each stage is a seral stage, and the sequence takes its name from where it starts, so a hydrosere begins in water, a psammosere in sand, a lithosere on rock, and a halosere in salt.
Etymology
The word is a back-formation from series, coined in the early twentieth century by ecologists working out the vocabulary of succession. It has nothing to do with the older English adjective sere meaning dry or withered, which is Old English and which turns up in Shakespeare and in Milton, and the two are pronounced identically.
Notes
The idea that a sere runs to a single stable endpoint, a climax community determined by climate, was the dominant model for decades and has been substantially revised. Disturbance is now understood as normal rather than exceptional, so most landscapes are a shifting mosaic of seral stages rather than a march toward one state, which is why a wood with no gaps in it is missing most of its species.