Classification of Plant Communities

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-viii

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2. Approaches to Classifying Vegetation

   • Robert H. Whittaker

   Pages 1-31

3. The Physiognomic Approach

   • John S. Beard

   Pages 33-64

4. Dominance-Types

   • Robert H. Whittaker

   Pages 65-79

5. The Finnish School and Forest Site-Types

   • Toomas E. A. Frey

   Pages 81-110

6. Synusial Approaches to Classification

   • Jan J. Barkman

   Pages 111-165

7. Russian Approaches to Classification of Vegetation

   • Vera D. Aleksandrova

   Pages 167-200

8. North European Approaches to Classification

   • Hans Trass, Nils Malmer

   Pages 201-245

9. Numerical Methods of Classification

   • David W. Goodall

   Pages 247-286

10. The Braun-Blanquet Approach

    • Victor Westhoff, Eddy Van Der Maarel

    Pages 287-399

11. Back Matter

    Pages 400-408

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The natural communities of the world are diverse, and many schools of ecology have developed classifications of communities in partial independence of one another. There is consequently a vast and widely dispersed literature on the classification of plant and animal communities, comprising divergent approaches of different schools and representing a great experiment on the usefulness of different possibilities for classification. The editor sought in a re­ view monograph of 1962 to summarize these schools and their history, and in 1973 published a treatise on 'Ordination and Clas­ sification of Communities' as volume 5 of the Handbook of Vegetation Science. We were fortunate, in preparing the latter work, to have a truly international panel of authors to discuss different major ap­ proaches to classification. This second edition of the book of 1973 is intended to make the work more widely available in a less expensive form as companion volumes on ordination and on classification of plant communities.

• Braun-Blanquet
• Vegetation
• forest
• plant

• Ecology and Systematics, Cornell University, Ithaca, USA

  Robert H. Whittaker

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