Author: Curtis, John T.
Description: Every science in the course of its history passes from the largely qualitative to the almost entirely quantitative approach and plant ecology, which has for some years been in a transitional stage, is no exception. Professor Curtis is one of the pioneers of quantitative analysis of plant communities and he and his associates at the Plant Ecology Laboratory of the University of Wisconsin have for the past two decades been engaged in collecting extensive data on the vegetation of Wisconsin and in devising suitable methods of analysing them. Professor Curtis’s aim in the present volume is to summarize the results of these investigations and to integrate them with those of other workers.
The first part of the book comprises chapters on the flora, the environmental factors and the types of plant community occurring in Wisconsin, together with a small but important chapter on the methods of study employed, namely, the sampling techniques and the determination of such values as species density, presence value, homogeneity indices and indices of similarity.
The next five parts deal in turn with the southern forests, the northern forests, grasslands, savannah and shrub communities, and lesser communities. For each community the general distribution, composition, environment, geographical relations and utilization are described, and details of life histories of dominant species are given.
Part 7 is concerned with the vegetation as a whole and has three chapters, the first on postglacial history, the second on the effect of man on the vegetation and the third on interrelations of communities. Most of the preceding chapters are mainly descriptive, many of the tabulated data and maps for each chapter being placed in appendices at the end of the book. The last chapter, however, gives an analysis of community structure and includes graphical representations illustrating the relations between community, environmental factors and life forms and showing the behaviour of individual species within the entire vegetational range.
It is hardly to be supposed that quantitative analysis of ecological data in itself would lead to any new or startling deductions, and indeed Professor Curtis draws only the following two conclusions: that within any community, stand-to-stand variation is continuous, distant stands being more different from each other than stands lying close together; and that each species behaves as an individual and not as a member of a coherent biological group. This is summed up in H. A. Gleason’s words: “An association is not an organism, scarcely even a vegetational unit, but merely a coincidence”. These are not new ideas but it is as well that plant ecologists should be reminded of them and be aware that they rest on firm methodological foundations.
The book itself is well produced, with many fine photographic plates, a glossary, an extensive bibliography, a species list and an index, as well as the chapter appendices mentioned above. There are two points at which improvement is possible. Firstly, typographical errors seem unnecessarily frequent, proper names in particular often being wrongly spelt; the name Raunkiaer, for example, appears several times as Raunkaier. Secondly, since the number of tables and figures in the main text is rather small, and the cross references to them give no page number, it is necessary either to hunt through many pages or to consult the list of contents each time before the required page is found.
Subject headings: Vegetation; Wisconsin; Plant ecology
Publication year: 1959
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Type: Book Whole
Serial number: 1855