Practice question

Under the inhibition model, established early colonists suppress recruitment or growth of later arrivals through preemption of space, resource capture, allelopathy, or other antagonistic effects. Replacement occurs chiefly when residents die or are damaged, releasing occupied sites rather than because they prepare the habitat for successors. Successional trajectories emerge from dispersal, establishment, species interactions, and organism-driven environmental change. Priority effects can make arrival order important, while retained soil and propagules strongly accelerate recovery after disturbance. Facilitation, tolerance, and inhibition are alternative mechanisms rather than mandatory universal stages; more than one may operate at the same site or at different times. The eventual assemblage also depends on climate, substrate, disturbance frequency, and the regional species pool, so a climax is better viewed as dynamic persistence than permanent equilibrium. In this context, the keyed term, Inhibition, identifies the relevant mechanism or quantitative relationship and links the observed pattern to its underlying ecological cause.