Theory and models in vegetation science

July 8 -13, 1985, an international group of scientists met in Uppsala for a symposium on the subject 'Theory and models in Vegetation science' . A volume of over 70 extended abstracts had already been published in time for the symposium (Leemans et at., 1985). That volume included contributions from nearly all of those who gave talks or presented posters at the symposium. The present volume represents the fully-refereed proceedings of the symposium and features articles by a majority of speakers, plus a handful by poster authors, and two that were sent independently to Vegetatio and seemed timely and relevant to the symposi­ um's theme. As organizers, we tried to bring together for the symposium people whose interests covered several key aspects of modern vegetation science: vegetation dynamics, on shorter or longer time scales; the analysis of community data, and of vegetation-environment relationships in both time and space; and the functional basis of vegetation in terms of the individual plants and plant populations that it comprises. We encouraged contributors to focus on theory and models - not necessarily mathematical models, but also conceptual models that might contribute to the development of theory and mathematical models.

Contenu

Relations between community theory and community analysis in vegetation science: some historical perspectives.- Hierarchical complexity in ecology: a noneuclidean conception of the data space.- A dynamical systems perspective on vegetation theory.- Models for the analysis of species' response to environmental gradients.- The individualistic and community-unit concepts as falsifiable hypotheses.- Compositional dissimilarity as a robust measure of ecological distance.- The analysis of vegetation-environment relationships by canonical correspondence analysis.- Ecological amplitudes of plant species and the internal consistency of Ellenberg's indicator values for moisture.- An evaluation of the relative robustness of techniques for ecological ordination.- A hierarchical consideration of causes and mechanisms of succession.- The role of expert systems in vegetation science.- Invasion models of vegetation dynamics.- Modeling of vegetation dynamics in the Mississippi River deltaic plain.- Gophers and grassland: a model of vegetation response to patchy soil disturbance.- Description and simulation of tree-layer composition and size distributions in a primaeval Picea-Pinus forest.- The separation of fluctuation and long-term change in vegetation dynamics of a rising seashore.- Regeneration dynamics of beech forests in Japan.- The appearance and disappearance of major vegetational assemblages: Long-term vegetational dynamics in eastern North America.- Climate and plant distribution at global and local scales.- Alternate plant life history strategies and coexistence in randomly varying environments.- Beyond reductionism and scholasticism in plant community ecology.- Some models of catastrophic behavior in exploited forests.- Author index.