Abstract
Correlations between plant form and climate are evident even to the most casual observer of vegetation. There have been several attempts to formalize these relationships by developing a system in which morphological attributes of the dominant plants in various parts of the world are predicted from selected climatic variables and then tested against field reality (Holdridge 1947; Box 1981). Further refinements of this correlative approach are being made, and with the application of modern analytical methods (e.g., Givnish 1986), it is probable that eventually the predictive models will be allied to a thorough mechanistic understanding of the way in which climate determines plant morphology and vegetation structure.
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Grime, J.P. (1993). Vegetation Functional Classification Systems as Approaches to Predicting and Quantifying Global Vegetation Change. In: Solomon, A.M., Shugart, H.H. (eds) Vegetation Dynamics & Global Change. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-2816-6_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-2816-6_15
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