Clements is best known for his theory of community development or plant succession. He claimed that a plant community underwent a predictable series of developmental stages that was comparable to the development of an organism. The final stage or climax community was determined by the climatic conditions of a geographic area. For Clements, the plant community was, in fact, a “complex organism” with a physiology that could be studied with the same precision as an organism in the laboratory. These organismal ideas were both influential and controversial during Clements’s lifetime.
