Classification of Ecosystems

Abstract

A feature of human thinking during the processes of scientific development has been the categorization of the objects with which one is dealing. This is reflected in the development of such disciplines as taxonomy and systematics, but the classification process has also been applied to communities of plants, and, to a very much lesser extent, to animal communities. Initially classification may have been an aim in itself, although there has usually been an essentially practical side of the work: classifications provided the framework within which different communities could be compared and contrasted, and from which predictions could be made about similar communities. The work of the European foresters amply illustrates this point. They classified forests by the tree species and the ground flora, and then having erected the forest classes they were able to apply the production data from sample plots to other forests in the same class.