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The Population Structure of Vegetation

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The Population Structure of Vegetation

Part of the book series: Handbook of Vegetation Science ((HAVS,volume 3))

Abstract

The primary purpose of this Handbook is to urge the complementarity of demographic and sociological approaches to vegetation science. This was suggested by A. S. Watt (1964) some twenty years ago, but his plea fell on deaf ears. Why is such advocacy necessary? Eighty years ago Frederic Clements in the first American textbook of ecology (Research Methods in Plant Ecology, 1905) wrote of the need for exact methods of vegetation analysis: he extolled the value of the quadrat which he had lately introduced with Roscoe Pound. He used it to list the plant species in a small, representative sample of vegetation and to provide a numerical estimate of their abundance, either absolutely or relatively. The ‘list quadrat’, so-called, allowed ‘the determination of the greatest variable in vegetation, namely number’. But this was to be augmented, he urged, by the ‘chart quadrat’, to indicate the areal extent of each species and to ‘furnish a valuable check upon mere number’. Ideally, in Clements’ view, list and chart quadrats should be permanent, that is, located in a fixed position and revisited regularly, to follow processes of migration, succession and competition in careful detail. These simple techniques, prescriptive in Clements’ opinion for accurate vegetation analysis, have underlain two of the major strands in vegetation science which are brought together in this Handbook, plant sociology and plant demography.

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  1. Department of Botany, University College Dublin, Dublin 4, Ireland

    J. White

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White, J. (1985). The Population Structure of Vegetation. In: White, J. (eds) The Population Structure of Vegetation. Handbook of Vegetation Science, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-5500-4_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-5500-4_1

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