From aceska@victoria.tc.ca Thu Apr 1 09:14:44 2004 From: aceska@victoria.tc.ca (Adolf Ceska) Date: Thu, 1 Apr 2004 01:14:44 -0800 Subject: [BEN-L]BEN # CCCXXV Message-ID: <004d01c417c9$c63c9160$744606cf@HPLAPTOP001> BBBBB EEEEEE NN N ISSN 1188-603X BB B EE NNN N BBBBB EEEEE NN N N BOTANICAL BB B EE NN NN ELECTRONIC BBBBB EEEEEE NN N NEWS No. CCCXXV April 1, 2004 aceska@victoria.tc.ca Victoria, B.C. ----------------------------------------------------------- Dr. A. Ceska, P.O.Box 8546, Victoria, B.C. Canada V8W 3S2 ----------------------------------------------------------- SNOUTERS - RHINOGRADENTIA Christian Morgenstern (1871 - 1914) is a very atypical figure in German literature. As a rule, German culture is not too fond of the nonsensical. However, Morgenstern's poetry, which was inspired by English nonsense rhymes, is immensely popular. 'The Gallows Songs' ('Galgenlieder') and 'Palmström' feature some of his masterpieces. Later, he turned away from the nonsensical and started to con- cern himself with philosophical topics. His philosophical and mythical works were largely influenced by Nietzsche, father of nihilism, and Rudolph Steiner, father of anthroposophy. In his Galgenlieder, Christian Morgenstern described an animal that was walking on its nose (probiscus): Das Nasobehm Auf seinen Nasen schreitet Einher das Nasobehm Von seinem Kind begleitet. Es steht noch nicht im Brehm. Es steht noch nicht im Meyer Und auch im Brockhaus nicht. Es trat aus meiner Leyer zum erstem Mal ans Licht. Auf seinen Nasen schreitet (wie schon gesagt) seitdem, von seinem Kind begleitet, einher das Nasobehm. English translation: Upon his noses walking, Enter the Nasibehm, Accompanied by his offspring, You will not find his name In Field Guides, the Brittanica, Not evenin Audubon; Out of my lyre, he first sprang iInto the light of Dawn. Upon his noses striding, As aforsung, he came With all his young beside him, The stately Nasobehm. [translated by W.D. Snodgrass and Lore Segal] This poem led to the most startling zoolgical event in the 20th century - the discovery of Rhinogradentia, an order of mammals with no fever than 15 families, 26 genera, and 138 species. Snouters, also known as Rhinogrades, were discovered in 1941 by a Swedish naturalist who became shipwrecked on the Hi-yi-yi Islands in the Pacific Ocean. But they received their first and only scientific description in a monograph, Bau und Leben der Rhinogradentia, published in 1957 by the German naturalist Harald Stuempke. Snouters, according to Stuempke, were a class of animals that had evolved to use their noses for virtually every imaginable function. For instance, the Sniffling Snouter caught fish with the long, delicate threads that emerged from its nostrils. The perfumed Honeytail Snouter stood rigidly upright on its thick nose and caught insects with its sticky tail. The Suctorial Snout Leaper used its long, flat nose to spring itself backwards great distances. Unfortunately, soon after Dr. Stuempke described the Snouters, the entire Hi-yi-yi island chain sank into the ocean as a result of an earthquake triggered by the testing of atomic bombs. When the islands sank, they took with them all trace of the Snouters, except for the sketches which Dr. Stuempke had commissioned an artist to make of them. A few of these sketches are shown to the left. Dr. Stuempke, who had returned to the islands to conduct further research, sank with the Snouters. Due to the complete extinction of the Snouters, and the eradica- tion of their only habitat, rumors have arisen to the effect that both Dr. Stuempke and the Snouters never existed. They are alleged to have been the whimsical creation of Gerolf Steiner, a zoology professor at the University of Heidelberg. Whether or not there is any substance to this rumor, interest in the Snouters continues to grow apace. The original German monograph has been translated into both French and English and has received glowing reviews. The English version of the book is titled The Snouters: Form and Life of the Rhinogrades. References: Dr. Harald Stuempke. The Snouters: Form and Life of the Rhinogrades. Translated by Leigh Chadwick. The Natural History Press (1967). http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/photos/snouters.html http://www.querblatt.de/buch/bul.htm http://nsm1.nsm.iup.edu/rgendron/Caminalcules.shtml Otopteryx volitans, Earwing or Flying Snout Leaper, was also reported from Wisconsin: http://wildlife.wisc.edu/courses/301/mammals/wisconsin_mammals.htm Nova Supplementa Entomologica http://www.zalf.de/deie/AUTORENH.HTM Dr Harald Stuempke Bau und Leben der Rhinogradentia mit ein Nachwort von Gerolf Steiner [1957] Gustav Fischer Verlag, 1967 (Hardback) French translation: Dr. Harald Stuempke Anatomie et Biologie des Rhinogrades un nouvelle ordre de mammiferes preface de P.-P.Grasse Traduction de R. Weil Masson & Cie, 1962 (Softback) [Also see: Science 140: 625. 1963] CONTAINING THE WHOLE SCIENCE OF GOVERNMENT LITTLE DORRIT - CHAPTER 10 From: Charles Dickens The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under Government. No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the largest public pie, and in the smallest public tart. It was equally impossible to do the plainest right and to undo the plainest wrong without the express authority of the Circumlocu- tion Office. If another Gunpowder Plot had been discovered half an hour before the lighting of the match, nobody would have been justified in saving the parliament until there had been half a score of boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks of official memoranda, and a family-vault full of ungrammatical correspondence, on the part of the Circumlocution Office. This glorious establishment had been early in the field, when the one sublime principle involving the difficult art of govern- ing a country, was first distinctly revealed to statesmen. It had been foremost to study that bright revelation and to carry its shining influence through the whole of the official proceed- ings. Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving -- how not to do it. Through this delicateperception, through the tact with which it invariably seized it,and through the genius with which it always acted on it, theCircumlocution Office had risen to overtop all the publicdepartments; and the public condition had risen to be -- what it was. It is true that How not to do it was the great study and object of all public departments and professional politicians all round the Circumlocution Office. It is true that every new premier and every new government, coming in because they had upheld a cer- tain thing as necessary to be done, were no sooner come in than they applied their utmost faculties to discovering How not to do it. It is true that from the moment when a general election was over, every returned man who had been raving on hustings because it hadn't been done, and who had been asking the friends of the honourable gentleman in the opposite interest on pain of im- peachment to tell him why it hadn't been done, and who had been asserting that it must be done, and who had been pledging him- self that it should be done, began to devise, How it was not to be done. It is true that the debates of both Houses of Parlia- ment the whole session through, uniformly tended to the protracted deliberation, How not to do it. It is true that the royal speech at the opening of such session virtually said, My lords and gentlemen, you have a considerable stroke of work to do, and you will please to retire to your respective chambers, and discuss, How not to do it. It is true that the royal speech, at the close of such session, virtually said, My lords and gentlemen, you have through several laborious months been considering with great loyalty and patriotism, How not to do it, and you have found out; and with the blessing of Providence upon the harvest (natural, not political), I now dismiss you. All this is true, but the Circumlocution Office went beyond it. Because the Circumlocution Office went on mechanically, every day, keeping this wonderful, all-sufficient wheel of statesman- ship, How not to do it, in motion. Because the Circumlocution Office was down upon any ill-advised public servant who was going to do it, or who appeared to be by any surprising accident in remote danger of doing it, with a minute, and a memorandum, and a letter of instructions that extinguished him. It was this spirit of national efficiency in the Circumlocution Office that had gradually led to its having something to do with everything. Mechanicians, natural philosophers, soldiers, sailors, petitioners, memorialists, people with grievances, people who wanted to prevent grievances, people who wanted to redress grievances, jobbing people, jobbed people, people who couldn't get rewarded for merit, and people who couldn't get punished for demerit, were all indiscriminately tucked up under the foolscap paper of the Circumlocution Office. Numbers of people were lost in the Circumlocution Office. Unfor- tunates with wrongs, or with projects for the general welfare (and they had better have had wrongs at first, than have taken that bitter English recipe for certainly getting them), who in slow lapse of time and agony had passed safely through other public departments; who, according to rule, had been bullied in this, over-reached by that, and evaded by the other; got referred at last to the Circumlocution Office, and never reap- peared in the light of day. Boards sat upon them, secretaries minuted upon them, commissioners gabbled about them, clerks registered, entered, checked, and ticked them off, and they melted away. In short, all the business of the country went through the Circumlocution Office, except the business that never came out of it; and its name was Legion. Sometimes, angry spirits attacked the Circumlocution Office. Sometimes, parliamentary questions were asked about it, and even parliamentary motions made or threatened about it by demagogues so low and ignorant as to hold that the real recipe of govern- ment was, How to do it. Then would the noble lord, or right honourable gentleman, in whose department it was to defend the Circumlocution Office, put an orange in his pocket, and make a regular field-day of the occasion. Then would he come down to that house with a slap upon the table, and meet the honourable gentleman foot to foot. Then would he be there to tell that honourable gentleman that the Circumlocution Office not only was blameless in this matter, but was commendable in this matter, was extollable to the skies in this matter. Then would he be there to tell that honourable gentleman that, although the Circumlocution Office was invariably right and wholly right, it never was so right as in this matter. Then would he be there to tell that honourable gentleman that it would have been more to his honour, more to his credit, more to his good taste, more to his good sense, more to half the dictionary of commonplaces, if he had left the Circumlocution Office alone, and never ap- proached this matter. Then would he keep one eye upon a coach or crammer from the Circumlocution Office sitting below the bar, and smash the honourable gentleman with the Circumlocution Office account of this matter. And ugh one of two things always happened; namely, either that the Circumlocution Office had nothing to say and said it, or that it had something to say of which the noble lord, or right honourable gentleman, blundered one half and forgot the other; the Circumlocution Office was always voted immaculate by an accommodating majority. Such a nursery of statesmen had the Department become in virtue of a long career of this nature, that several solemn lords had attained the reputation of being quite unearthly prodigies of business, solely from having practised, How not to do it, as the head of the Circumlocution Office. As to the minor priests and acolytes of that temple, the result of all this was that they stood divided into two classes, and, down to the junior mes- senger, either believed in the Circumlocution Office as a heaven-born institution that had an absolute right to do whatever it liked; or took refuge in total infidelity, and considered it a flagrant nuisance. IN THE NORTHWEST: A CLEARCUT BY ANY OTHER NAME IS STILL A CLEARCUT From: Joel Connelly [joelconnelly@seattlepi.com] abbreviated by AC from Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Wednesday, March 3, 2004 In days when it was stripping ancient forests from steep hillsides, and shipping the raw logs to Japan, our state Depart- ment of Natural Resources operated by the maxim: My way or the highway. It had a clearcut solution for forests in the Sultan River basin east of Everett, the Clearwater River on the west side of the Olympic Peninsula, and the South Fork-Nooksack River country near Bellingham. Bureaucracies adapt to survive. Our once-infamous "Department of Nothing Remaining" seemed yesterday to be trying out a new motto: You can have your cake and eat it too. It promised more logging, more income and more environmental protection -- all at the same time. The DNR persuaded the Board of Natural Resources to give the go- ahead to a 10-year "preferred alternative" for management of 1.4 million acres of state-owned forests in Western Washington. The bottom line: Logging will increase by at least 30 percent over current levels. Let's start with new terminology. Instead of clearcuts, the department now speaks of "regeneration harvest." Logging along sensitive streams is referred to as creating "biodiversity pathways." Overall, the preferred alternative is called "active stewardship." How much has really changed? Before taking up the statewide plan, the Board of Natural Resources ratified several large cuts. "Regeneration harvest" in the 237-acre Camp Robber timber sale down in Clark County will leave exactly eight trees per acre. Likewise the Vedder Top sale in Whatcom County, and the Taggin Sale in Snohomish County. The North Branch sale down in Wah- kiakum County is a little more generous, leaving nine trees per acre. A clearcut by any other name is still a clearcut. The DNR has also been juggling figures. A couple of weeks back, the estimated average annual timber cut for the next decade was pegged at about 630 million board feet: Yesterday, it was scaled back to 554 million board feet -- with the 630 million board foot goal set for a decade down the line. Why? It will take time to "ramp up," Mackey said. "There are implementation realities we can't get around." The department has also revised downward estimates of cutting in riparian zones, areas near streams. In mid-February it envi- sioned 3,052 acres of "regeneration harvest" each year, yielding 25,800 board feet per acre, from such sensitive places. The latest version of the plan lists 1,500 acres of "variable den- sity thinning" each year producing 16,000 board feet per acre. Bob Dick of the American Forest Resources Council was full of praise for the department, its data, its plan and a process that he described as "open beyond belief." Alluding to the bad old days, Dick added: "That was the 1970s. It's not today. It is a much different world out there and the DNR knows it." True. Our "Department of Nothing Remaining" is saintly compared with, say, the pillagers operating out of the Chilliwack Ranger District of the British Columbia Forest Service. The Canadians have recently stripped a small mountain valley, surrounded by Skagit Valley and Manning provincial parks, just north of the U.S. border. B.C. is planning more cuts in Depot Creek, which flows over the border from our North Cascades National Park. High-elevation clearcuts on land along the U.S.- Canada border remain open scars decades after the loggers have left. Still, the Department of Natural Resources is a willful beast -- and one that is out to sustain itself for 10 years to come. When this column criticized DNR's rapid-fire hearing schedule last December -- and predicted that the wheels were greased for more logging -- Bruce Mackey wrote an angry op-ed piece denying that any decisions were made. Watching him steer the "preferred alternative" through the Board of Natural Resources yesterday, I was reminded of the police commissioner in "Casablanca" who was shocked -- shocked! -- upon learning that gambling was going on at Rick's. The public will get the formality of one more response when the Department of Natural Resources publishes its final environmen- tal impact statement in May. By Memorial Day, the DNR should be able to say, "Gentlemen, start your chain saws." GROUND CONTROL TO MR. BUSH Andy Rooney looks at President Bush's $1.5 billion proposal to promote marriage in the U.S. and the possibility sending someone on a one-way 35-million-mile trip to Mars: http://cbsnewyork.com/rooney/sixtyminutes_story_025200726.html WEAPON OF MASS DISTRUCTION The Complete Idiot's Guide to Robert's Rules of Order by Nancy Sylvester Complete and thorough, but simplified in plain English! Finally, a Robert's Rules of Order in an easy to understand format. 352 pages of everything you will ever need to know to keep your organization or meetings running smooth! ________________________________________________________________ Subscriptions: http://victoria.tc.ca/mailman/listinfo/ben-l Send submissions to aceska@victoria.tc.ca BEN is archived at http://www.ou.edu/cas/botany-micro/ben/ ________________________________________________________________ From aceska@victoria.tc.ca Thu Apr 8 09:40:36 2004 From: aceska@victoria.tc.ca (Adolf Ceska) Date: Thu, 8 Apr 2004 01:40:36 -0700 Subject: [BEN-L]BEN # 326 Message-ID: <000001c41d45$2c7ff9f0$744606cf@HPLAPTOP001> BBBBB EEEEEE NN N ISSN 1188-603X BB B EE NNN N BBBBB EEEEE NN N N BOTANICAL BB B EE NN NN ELECTRONIC BBBBB EEEEEE NN N NEWS No. 326 April 8, 2004 aceska@victoria.tc.ca Victoria, B.C. ----------------------------------------------------------- Dr. A. Ceska, P.O.Box 8546, Victoria, B.C. Canada V8W 3S2 ----------------------------------------------------------- This issue of BEN is dedicated to my friend Dr. Zdenka Neuhauslova a prominent Czech botanist and phytosociologist, who celebrated her 70th birthday on April 4. Zdenka and her husband, the late Dr. Robert Neuhausl, initiated the international "_Vegetation Map of Europe_" project. ON THE STATUS OF PHYTOSOCIOLOGY AS A DISCIPLINE From: Joerg Ewald, Freising-Weihenstephan The _Vegetation Map of Europe_, coordinated from 1979-1991 by Robert Neuhausl from Prague and completed under the auspices of Germany's Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN), is a milestone of applied vegetation science. Hundreds of phytosociologists from 31 European countries contributed to this project at the turn of the millennium. Europe's potential natural vegetation is presented at the scale of 1:2.5 million (Bohn et al. 2000). The explanatory text and CD-ROM are in the process of publication; a sample map can be viewed interactively through the website Floraweb (http://www.synbiosys.alterra.nl/eu/) The map and its legend (ca. 700 units organised in 19 forma- tions) represent a first attempt to provide an ecologically meaningful phytosociological classification across national boundaries. This is but one outstanding example of the maturity of European vegetation science. Considering such an achievement, the news that there will be no successor after Dr. Bohn's retirement, and thus no continuation to his co-ordinating activities came as a shock. There is a definitive sense of crisis in phytosociologi- cal circles: it can't be denied that phytosociology as a naturalist, descriptive and generalist (i. e. genuinely inter- disciplinary) approach does have troubles positioning itself as a science, when the majority of biologists turn to molecular genetics and when the majority of the remaining organismal biologists turn to experiments and population models. Tragically, phytosociology has hardly gained visibility in recent biodiversity research, which has rapidly become the harbour for the various remnants of organismal biology worldwide. As a consequence, it hardly participates in large national and international funding initiatives. Some vegetation scientists may simply be reluctant to engage in the rat race of modern science and rather concentrate on applications of their science in local and regional conservation efforts. A remarkable number of regional botanical periodicals survive under the auspices of botanical societies and museums. However, young phytosociologists have to realize that publishing their results in these journals will hardly give them access to an academic career. Submitting manuscripts to international journals, they often find them disqualified as of local significance only. In turn, traditional journals are torn between the conflicting goals of their traditional readership and international recogni- tion. Of course, these conditions push the remaining academic phytosociologists away from classical work, both in terms of project acquisition and of educating young plant ecologists. This inevitable specialization occurs at the expense of typical strengths like broad knowledge of the flora, vegetation types, geology, pedology, landscape structure and history. In modern society, there appears to be a negative correlation between the amount of attention devoted to biodiversity and the actual skills of its recognition. This may be an inevitable process of maturation and progress. The task of classifying Central Europe's vegetation and record- ing its plant biodiversity is largely completed. There is no shortage of informative books on plants and plant communities. What is the point in challenging these fairly reliable systems time and time again? Isn't vegetation survey simply done and over with and must duly be replaced by more reductionist, predictive research strategies? If we think of biodiversity as something to be discovered, described and placed in a museum, then Central European phytosociology must be seen as a mere historical footnote. Yet such fatalism is based on a double misunderstanding: one is that phytosociology's ultimate goal is classification. The second is that the scientific fascination with biodiversity lies chiefly in discovering more of it. Phytosociology studies the "social life of plant species", that is their co-occurrence in space and time (Ewald 2003) and classification is but one method of analysing these patterns. In the mind of the plant ecologist and biogeographer, biodiversity research should be about understand- ing the historical and actualistic mechanisms behind diversity patterns. It is thus only the natural consequence that phytosociologists are now increasingly considering the mechanisms behind plant communities. A cross-sectional technique naturally offers a multitude of paths into neighbouring fields like ecosystem analysis, plant-animal interactions or population biology, sometimes even considered as parts of phytosociology in the broad sense. Such centrifugal forces may quickly dissolve our discipline beyond recognition . How can phytosociology avoid being over-stretched between oppos- ing forces of local application and global science? Can the centrifugal energy of specialization be deflected back into phytosociology as an integrative discipline? What is its genuine contribution to modern plant ecology and biodiversity research? The answer lies in phytosociology as a method: the releve? plot (a list of all visible plant species found in a location) and its multivariate analysis are at the heart of the matter. Releves have always been measurements of community richness (alpha diversity), vegetation tables are plots of beta- diver- sity (species turnover along gradients) and synoptic tables are summaries of gamma diversity (species pools, meta- communities). Thoroughly sampled plots and their skilful arrangement are the touchstone of good phytosociology. The European tradition of printing unreduced releves reflects the value placed upon original data in the phytosociological community. The reader is enabled to evaluate the quality of the proposed classification, and to reject it, if necessary, on the grounds that it needs re- analysis. Publishing ever more releves has created a vast legacy of data that is shared by the community of phytosociologists. In the process of re-analysis, many older plot data have been used to underpin alternative classifications, as in the several editions of Oberdorfer's conspectus (1957, 1992). However, the accession, handling and administration of these data - in fact, the begin- nings of biodiversity informatics - have been extremely tedious in the pre-digital age, usually reducing the critical re- analysis of larger datasets to a theoretical option. Millions of releves have been digitized in various sorts of electronic databases, and yet political, institutional and scientific obstacles severely limit their widespread use (Ewald 2001). Phytosociological data are more complex than one may think at first sight: at their core they report gathering events (sensu Berendsohn et al. 1999, the recording of a releve) by relating keys for plant taxa to an abundance scale and to plot information (often called header data). TURBOVEG (Hennekens & Schaminee 2001) was the first widely used software providing a structure taylored to phytosociology. However, the challenge of managing alternative taxonomies of plants and of vegetation types remains largely unresolved, imposing tight limits on exchange between existing databases. These problems underpin the need for a sound reference model for vegetation data (see ESA's vegbank datastructure: http://www.bio.unc.edu/faculty/peet/vegdata/ ) which will re- quire continued research and collaboration with taxonomists and software engineers. Biodiversity informatics has become crucial for the future of phytosociology (see IAVS Working Group for Ecoinformatics: http://vegbank.org/vegbank/general/info.html ). Modernising the tools for managing its resource, the plot legacy, phytosociology will also become more efficient in reach- ing its proximate goal of providing a widely accepted stable syntaxonomy. In the future descriptive and syntaxonomical publi- cations should be accompanied by depositing the underlying releve? material in public electronic archives, thus making vegetation classification and analysis transparent and repeatable in the strict sense of the word. This means no more and no less than taking our traditional appreciation of releve? data to the Internet age. Even more promise lies in exchanging scientific hypotheses and the data to test them among the various branches of plant ecol- ogy. Spatially and temporally explicit releves contribute to floristic databases. Phytosociological and trait databases are a perfect match for studying plant functional types (e. g. Pillar & Sosinski 2003) and their implications for management. Geographical information systems are an invaluable source to retrieve enviromental information for phytosociological analyses (e.g., Ohmann & Spies 1998). Combining composition, distribu- tion, function and environment, vegetation models are probably the most integrating application of plant biodiversity infor- matics. If one appreciates its genuine contribution to biodiversity informatics, phytosociology can - instead of disappearing in the vastness of plant ecological research - carry its tradition and founding principles into modernity. If this is realised (as projected in the European SynBioSys project - http://ice.zadi.de/floraweb/pnv/index.htm ), Bohn et al.'s map will become what it deserves to be: a milestone, not an endpoint. References Berendsohn, W.G., A. Anagnostopoulos, G. Hagedorn, J. Jakupovic, P.L. Nimis, B. Valdes, A. Guentsch, R.J. Pankhurst, & R.J. White. 1999. A comprehensive reference model for biological collections and surveys. _Taxon_ 48: 511-562. Bohn, U., G. Gollub, C. Hettwer, Z. Neuhauslova, H. Schlueter, & H. Weber. 2003. _Karte der natuerlichen Vegetation Europas. Map of the natural vegetation of Europe_. Federal Agency for Nature Conservation, Bonn. Ewald, J. 2001. Der Beitrag pflanzensoziologischer Datenbanken zur vegetationsoekologischen Forschung. _Berichte der Rein- hold Tuexen-Gesellschaft_ 13: 53-69. Ewald, J. 2003. A critique for phytosociology. _Journal of Vegetation Science_ 14: 291-296. Hennekens, S. & J.H.J. Schaminee. 2001. TURBOVEG, a comprehen- sive data base management system for vegetation data. _Jour- nal of Vegetation Science_ 12: 589-591. Oberdorfer, E. 1957. Sueddeutsche Pflanzengesellschaften. Gustav Fischer, Jena. Oberdorfer, E. 1992. Sueddeutsche Pflanzengesellschaften, Teil IV. Waelder und Gebuesche. Eugen Ulmer, Stuttgart. Ohmann, J.L., & T.A. Spies. 1998. Regional gradient analysis and spatial pattern of woody plant communities of Oregon forests. Ecological Monographs 68: 151-182. Pillar, V.D., & E.E. Sosinski Jr. 2003. An improved method for searching plant functional types by numerical analysis. _Journal of Vegetation Science_ 14: 323-332. BOOK REVIEW: MAP OF NATURAL VEGETATION OF EUROPE From: Hans Roemer [hlroemer@shaw.ca] Bohn U., Neuhausl R., unter Mitarbeit von Gollub G., Hettwer C., Neuhauslova Z., Schlueter H. et Weber H. 2000/2003. Map of the Natural Vegetation of Europe. Scale 1 : 2,500,000. A monumental cooperative project has just been completed with the publication of the Map of the Natural Vegetation of Europe. The printed work comes in three parts: 1) A map volume with 9 map sheets at 1:2,500,000 and one over- view map at 1:10,000,000. 2) A 153 page Legend volume (German and English). 3) The 654 page Explanatory Text volume. The map volume has an additional color-keyed legend sheet which shows aggregated map units, while the legend in book form has further details (i.e. including the letter/number subunits shown on the maps separated by thin lines, but not distinguished by color). Altogether, the mapping contains 698 mapping units and there are some 170 different colors. The Explanatory volume contains another 13 maps on topics including floral and geographical realms, various excerpt maps for specific vegeta- tion complexes, and one CD ROM (see below). The mapping comprises an area including Iceland in the northwest, Novaja Zemlya in the northeast, the Caspian Sea and Caucasus in the southeast, and the Iberian Peninsula in the southwest. The classification underlying the mapping is hierarchical, with vegetation formations the first principle of organization, followed by plant geographical and eventually ecological criteria. Nineteen main formations are described which are subdivided into the ultimate 698 units. The mapping portrays the potential natural vegetation, rather than current modifications and successional stages caused by human management. The Explanatory volume describes mainly the vegetation forma- tions, but also the history of the international initiative, the general principles and underlying classification for the map- ping, and the geological and vegetation history of the map area. Each of the main formations has a thorough treatment of its typological delimitation, geographical distribution, structure and physiognomy, species combination, syntaxonomy, climate, site conditions, landscape context, state of preservation, land uses, successional and disclimax stages, and formal conservation status/designations. Compressed vegetation tables are presented for many of the more well-researched vegetation units. This volume also has 148 excellent color photographs for a selection of well-preserved vegetation units as well as 23 figures and diagrams. An extensive bibliography of regional and country mapping projects, a list of scientific collaborators, synonymy lists and taxonomic comments complete the volume. Besides the specialized excerpt maps, the back pocket also carries the CD ROM. The main contents of the CD ROM are very detailed data sheets for each of the 698 mapping units. Further there is a comprehensive bibliography keyed to the map units, a complete list of the plant species mentioned anywhere in this work's different components, a glossary, and a list of contributors to the mapping. The data sheets have some information in common with the Explanatory volume, but are more specific for the mapping units and considerably more detailed where the source information allowed this. The CD ROM contents forms a data base which is searchable by vegetation units and by the name of any plant species mentioned in the data sheets. For instance, a search for Iris pumila (there are 17 species of Iris listed) leads you to three dif- ferent vegetation units, L7: West Caucasian meadow steppes, L16: Crimean herb-grass steppes, and M16: West and central Pontic desert steppes. The last of these occurs on and near the Crimean Peninsula. Search results for it reveal a species combination of some 20 grasses, subshrubs, herbs and geophytes dominated by _Stipa_, _Festuca_ and _Artemisia_ species. As an example of floristic detail, we learn that _Cladonia rangiformis_, _C. subrangiformis_, _Parmelia ryssola_, _P. vagans_, _Cornicularia steppae_, and _Tortula ruralis_ form a moss/lichen layer. About two pages of additional ecological, structure, synsystematic, geographical, soil, climate and distributional information are available on the M16 data sheet. Searching for a more widespread species, _Festuca_ heterophylla (there are 98 species of _Fes- tuca_ that are searchable!), results in a list of 17 mapping units. The mapping and legend portions of this work are fully func- tional in both German and English. However the explanatory volume is in German only and so is the CD ROM at present. However, a new interactive version of the CD ROM is promised "for 2003" which will also be issued in English and will be redesigned to solicit feedback on those vegetation units that require further work to bring them up to the central European standard of detail. This publication is the product of intensive scientific col- laboration over a twenty-year period involving experts from 31 European countries and the Caucasus states. International col- laboration started in earnest as a result of a colloquium held in 1979 in Bohemia, but attempts to work towards a Europe- wide vegetation map existed even earlier. From 1979 Dr. Robert Neuhausl of Czechoslovakia became the leading proponent and coordinator for this project. After his death in 1991 his wife, Dr. Zdenka Neuhauslova carried on his work in collaboration with the new coordinator, Dr. Udo Bohn of the German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation in Bonn. Much of the map is based on pre-existing vegetation maps of the individual countries and regions involved (a bibliography of these maps is provided in the Explanatory volume). By necessity, these maps were of various degrees of detail and based on a variety of class- ification systems. Coordination, correlation and boundary match- ing of these maps must have been a horrendous task to perform. However, the elegance of the final product certainly belies these obvious difficulties! Congratulations for this achievement are due to the coordinator, the authors, and the scientific collaborators, especially those who worked on this project during the time of political adver- sity before the fall of the iron courtain. Explanatory Text (German) with CD ROM. ISBN 3-7843-3837-2 Eur 38.00 Maps and Legend volumes (German and English)ISBN 3-7843- 3809-7 Eur 16.00 Order from: BfN-Schriftenvertrieb im Landwirtschaftsverlag 48084 Muenster, Germany http://www.1v-h.de/bfn FOOTNOTE TO "MAP OF THE NATURAL VEGETATION OF EUROPE": INTERACTIVE ENGLISH CD VERSION IN THE WORKS The monumental mapping project for the European continent will soon be available in an interactive, bilingual English/German CD-ROM package. A preview of this CD was given at a recent vegetation database workshop near Munich, and it is very impressive. Not only will there be linked, query-able datasheets for the 698 different mapping units, these are in turn linked to an interactive spa- tial display very reminiscent of ArcView. One can zoom into and out of the various regions, click coverages on and off, clip and paste, click on units to be connected with datasheets, photos of vegetation types or chapters of the explanatory text, and sort data within the datasheets according to the user's criteria - and all in this in English, if that is your language of choice. This will be a major research and teaching tool and a sig- nificant contribution towards understanding vegetation patterns and setting conservation priorities at the European level. English-speaking users would be well served to wait for this version, which is promised within the next 2-4 months from the German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN) (http://www.bfn.de). BIOGEOCLIMATIC MAPS FOR BRITISH COLUMBIA From: Del Meidinger [Del.Meidinger@gems2.gov.bc.ca] The Ministry of Forests Research Branch recently posted files of Biogeoclimatic Subzone/Variant maps at a scale of (1:250,000 or 1:300,000) for the entire province. These maps are available in Adobe Acrobat (pdf) format and can be accessed from the follow- ing website: http://www.for.gov.bc.ca/hre/becweb/mapping.htm#getting (go to "Subzone Variant Mapping at a District Scale"). There are 2 series of maps, one with a full base designed for use in the field and one with a shaded relief background designed as a wall map. These maps cover the entire 950,000 kmė of British Columbia. There are 14 biogeoclimatic zones and about 192 mapped subzones or variants (units are mapped to the lowest recognized biogeoclimatic unit). Digital files of biogeoclimatic units for use in GIS modelling are also available at this web site. Field guides that present the classification of ecosystems within a biogeoclimatic unit are available for most subzones/variants. See the links to various guides beginning with "A field guide for site identification and interpretation" at http://www.for.gov.bc.ca/hfd/pubs/Lmh.htm BOOK REVIEW: CIRCUMBOREAL CONIFEROUS FORESTS From: Marcel Rejmanek [mrejmanek@ucdavis.edu] This review will be published in Madrono; permission to post it in BEN was granted by both the author and the journal. Vegetation of circumboreal coniferous forests. Edited by Milan Chytry and Toby Spribille. 2002. OPULUS Press, Uppsala, Sweden. 184 pp. EUR 30.00 ISBN 91-88716-27-9. Order from: http://www.opuluspress.se/ The coniferous forests of Eurasia and North America represent one of the largest vegetation formations in the world, occupying approximately 19 million km2. The centers of biodiversity of these forests are in eastern Asia and western North America. However, despite their vast size and environmental significance, boreal forests have received comparatively little attention from phytosociologists. Their continuous distribution across the northern hemisphere points to the need for international cooperation in comparative studies and prioritization of par- ticular areas for conservation. In order to facilitate such cooperation, a workshop entitled "_Vegetation Classification and Phytogeography of Circumboreal Coniferous Forests_" was held in association with the 44th Symposium of the International As- sociation for Vegetation Science in Freising-Weihenstephan, Germany, in 2001. The volume under review took shape at this workshop. It proves that finding a common platform for an under- standing of the circumboreal coniferous biome is a realistic goal. Representation of relevant geographical areas is reasonably balanced: two chapters on European coniferous forests, two on forests in Asia, and two on forests in British Columbia, the American Northwest, and the Rocky Mountains. Toby Spribille and Alina Stachurska-Swakon wrote chapters on classification of North American coniferous forests. As it has already been ap- parent from his earlier writings (1999, 2000, 2001), Spribille emerges as a leader in American phytosociology. His elaborated descriptions of forest communities (bryophytes and lichens are included) and their classification into floristically defined associations, alliances, and orders match international stand- ards and follow rules of the International Code of Phytosociological Nomenclature (Weber et al. 2000). In the two mentioned chapters, over 700 releves were used for identifica- tion of 35 associations of which 13 were described for the first time. Also, one new alliance and one new order were validly published here. We should appreciate validation of several old names in these chapters. This is a commendable habit that helps to maintain links to earlier studies and prevents accumulation of unnecessary synonyms. The only critical comment that I can make is probably not com- pletely fair at this stage of development of phytosociology in North America (and, for the same reason in Asia), but it still should be spelled out: more attention should be paid to soil and climate characterization of individual syntaxa. So far, qualita- tive statements about soil moisture, longitudinal and al- titudinal range, slope, and cover in individual strata is usually all what is provided. In Europe, phytosociology has been walking hand in hand with soil science since the very beginning when Josias Braun-Blanquet started working with Hans Jenny in the Alps in the early 1920's. Currently, an unresolved issue is whether boreal coniferous forests in North American belong to the class (the highest vegetation classification unit) _Vaccinio-Piceetea_, originally described by Braun-Blanquet and his colleagues from the Alps. Many circumboreal elements of these forests (_Galium boreale_, _Linnaea borealis_, _Listera cordata_, _Lycopodium_ spp., _Moneses uniflora_, _Orthilia secunda_, _Pleurozium schreberi_, _Rhytidiadelphus loreus_, _Vaccinium uliginosum_, etc.) provide the justification for one circumboreal class. However, the paucity of traditional _Vaccinio-Piceetea_ species in the forests of the alliance _Tsugion mertensianae_, known from subalpine habitats in Oregon, Idaho and British Columbia, makes this question more complicated. Chapter by Milan Chytry (Czech Republic) and his colleagues from Austria and Slovakia deals with the Central European _Picea abies_ forests. This chapter deserves a special attention. It addresses a nagging question of inconsistent approaches to the designation of diagnostic species. Using 20,164 releves from the Central European forests, they concluded that lists of diagnos- tic species published in phytosociological literature are heavily context-dependent. Some of these lists are useful for identification of vegetation units at a local scale, while others for distinguishing units within a narrowly delimited community type over a large area. Therefore, the application of published lists of diagnostic species outside of the context (the underlying data sets and range of comparisons) should be done only with an explicit understanding of this context. Two recent attempts to classify vegetation in the western USA have been, for many different reasons, unsatisfactory; for critical evaluations see Keil (1997), Rejmanek (1997), Spribille and Ceska (2002), and Zedler (1997). As a contrast, North American studies in this volume, as well as studies by Manuel Peinado and his colleagues (1997, 1998), represent a definitive starting points of, and models for, professional vegetation classification in this part of the world. Because now, after a long period of neglect, the need for vegetation classification is clearly recognized in the U.S. (http://www.esa.org/vegweb/NVC_guidelines_v3.pdf), this volume should be available, at least, in all professional libraries. References Keil, D. J. 1997. A Manual of California Vegetation [review]. _Systematic Botany_ 22: 410-411. Peinado, M., J.L. Aguirre, & J. Delgadillo. 1997. Phytosociological, bioclimatic and biogeographical class- ification of woody climax communities of western North America. _Journal of Vegetation Science_ 8: 505-528. Peinado, M., J.L. Aguirre, & M. de la Cruz. 1998. A phytosociological survey of the boreal forests (_Vaccinio- Piceetea) in North America_. Plant Ecology 137: 151-202. Rejmanek, M. 1997. Vegetation classification: shortcuts lead nowhere. _Global Ecology and Biogeography Letters_ 6: 164- 165. Spribille, T. 1999. Forest vegetation in the northern Salish Mountains of northwestern Montana (U.S.A.). _Phytoc- coenologia_ 29: 503-577. Spribille, T. 2000. Clarification regarding the paper "Forest vegetation in the northern Salish Mountains of northwestern Montana (U.S.A.)". _Phytocoenologia_ 30: 143-144. Spribille, T. and A. Ceska. 2002. North American Boreal and Western Temperate Forest Vegetation [review]. _Journal of Vegetation Science_ 13: 749-750. See also: http://www.ou.edu/cas/botany-micro/ben/ben276.html Spribille, T., H.G. Stroh, & F.J. Triepke. 2001. Are habitat types compatible with floristically defined associations? _Journal of Vegetation Science_ 12: 791-796. Weber, H.E., J. Moravec, & J.-P. Theurillat, 2000. International code of phytosociological nomenclature. 3rd ed. _Journal of Vegetation Science_ 11: 739-768. Zedler, P. H. 1997. A Manual of California Vegetation [review]. _Madrono_ 44: 214-219 MOUNTAIN FORESTS OF NORTHWESTERN NORTH AMERICA From: Spribille, Toby. 2002. The mountain forests of British Columbia and the American Northwest: Floristic patterns and syntaxonomy. _Folia Geobotanica_ 37: 475-508. Introduction, and syntaxonomical units. [Permission to post this in BEN granted by both the author and the _Folia Geobotanica_.] The forests of northwestern North America have been extensively inventoried and classified. The systems of classification used in this region, however, are not always well understood in other parts of the world. Primarily two approaches to forest class- ification have been employed. In the United States, habitat typology, a forest site classification system based on concepts of succession and climax (Pfister & Arno 1980), has enjoyed widespread acceptance. In western Canada, a three-tiered ap- proach to site and vegetation inventory known as biogeoclimatic ecosystem classification (Krajina 1969, Pojar et al. 1987) is used. These systems were set up largely to facilitate regional ecosystem mapping and silvicultural management of forested lands. In both cases, the systems have proven well-suited to their stated goals. However, they are for various reasons not directly compatible with syntaxonomic systems used elsewhere (Spribille et al. 2001). This has carried with it the disad- vantage of making most research tied to these ecosystems less accessible to vegetation science as a whole. Notwithstanding this drawback, vegetation inventory efforts in northwestern North America have provided an abundance of data on the floristic composition of the forests. High quality phytosociological releves have been gathered in the thousands for the preparation of forest habitat type classifications in the western United States (Wellner 1989). In British Columbia, similar numbers of releves have been sampled for the construc- tion of forest site identification manuals by the provincial Ministry of Forests (Meidinger & Pojar 1991). Graduate and doctoral theses and dissertations completed on various vegeta- tion types over the past 50 years provide yet another sig- nificant source of phytosociological data. Many of these are, however, unpublished and little known. Several syntaxonomic and physiognomic overviews of the forest vegetation of parts or all of northwestern North America have been presented (e.g., Ilvessalo 1929, Kujala 1945, Knapp 1957, Hamet-Ahti 1965, Krajina 1969, Franklin & Dyrness 1973, Pfister et al. 1977, Meidinger & Pojar 1991, Klinka et al. 1996, Peinado et al. 1997, 1998, Rivas-Mart­nez et al. 1999a,b). These works have provided valuable synopses of the composition, climate, ecology and geographic extent of the forest communities of the region. However, they have only rarely built on each other. This is especially true of syntaxonomic proposals. If one includes the lowland _Pseudotsuga menziesii_ forests not treated here, this practice has resulted in the description of no fewer than 5 classes, 20 orders, 56 alliances and over 110 associations from forests in the region. It is important to note that this tally does not include the numerous site associations described within the framework of biogeoclimatic ecosystem classification in British Columbia, nor the many habitat types and associations described by forest workers in the American Pacific Northwest. Clearly, the region has experienced a veritable explosion. in the number of described syntaxa, not unlike that seen in Europe four decades ago (Pignatti 1968). In northwestern North America, however, the syntaxa are described in three different syn- taxonomic languages. Notwithstanding the differing names applied to these com- munities, existing overviews of the forest vegetation of northwestern North America almost invariably recognize the existence of the same major forest formations. In general terms, eight of these can be recognized. In order from oceanic to continental, these include 1. coastal temperate rainforests dominated by _Picea sitchen- sis_ and _Tsuga heterophylla_, 2. coastal temperate forests dominated by _Pseudotsuga menziesii_, _Thuja plicata_, _Tsuga heterophylla_ or _Alnus rubra_, 3. coastal montane to subalpine forests dominated by _Tsuga mertensiana_, _Abies amabilis_ and _Chamaecyparis nootkatensis_, 4. inland moist temperate forests dominated by _Thuja plicata_ and _Tsuga heterophylla_, 5. inland montane to subalpine forests dominated by _Abies lasiocarpa_ and _Picea engelmannii_, 6. southern boreal forests of _Pinus contorta_, _Abies lasiocarpa_ and _Picea glauca_ in the transition zone to the boreal biome, 7. dry inland forests, dominated by _Pseudotsuga menziesii_ var. _glauca_ or _Larix occidentalis_, and finally 8. _Pinus ponderosa_ steppe forests. The major differences between the existing classification schemes lie in how the individual formations are delimited, in how they are considered to relate to each other and to other forest formations elsewhere in the world, and lastly, in how they are named. Creating a platform for scientific exchange across international boundaries is one of the overarching objec- tives of phytosociological syntaxonomy. This paper is the first installment of a syntaxonomic revision of the coniferous forests of northwestern North America. Here, the main objective will be to examine communities most closely related to the circumboreal coniferous forests. These include the coastal and inland montane and subalpine forests summarized in (3) to (6) above. These forests have in common not only similarities in floristic com- position, but also occurrence at middle to upper elevations, cool, short summers and moderate to high annual precipitation. _Tsugion mertensianae_ _Rubo-Tsugetum mertensianae_ _Vaccinio-Tsugetum mertensianae_ _Cladothamno-Tsugetum mertensianae_ _Abieti amabilis-Tsugetum mertensianae_ _Rhododendro-Abietetum lasiocarpae_ _Abieti lasiocarpae-Tsugetum mertensianae_ _Angelico-Abietetum bifoliae_ _Luzulo-Abietetum bifoliae_ _Menziesio-Abietetum bifoliae_ _Xerophyllo-Pinetum albicaulis_ _Abieti-Tsugion heterophyllae_ _Arnico-Abietetum bifoliae_ _Ledo-Piceetum engelmannii_ _Xerophyllo-Abietetum bifoliae_ _Thuja plicata-Tsuga heterophylla_ forest _Pino latifoliae-Piceetum marianae_ _Vaccinio-Piceetum albertianae_ _Pleurozio-Tsugetum heterophyllae_ _Gymnocarpio-Abietion_ _Piceo-Tsugetum heterophyllae_ _Gymnocarpio disjuncti-Thujetum plicatae_ _Streptopo streptopoidis-Tsugetum heterophyllae_ _Gymnocarpio-Abietetum lasiocarpae_ _Rubo-Piceetum sitchensis_ _ Tsugo mertensianae-Piceetum sitchensis_ _Oplopanaco-Thujetum plicatae_ _Lysichito-Chamaecyparidion nootkatensis_ _Lysichito-Chamaecyparidetum nootkatensis_ References Franklin, J.F.. & C.T. Dyrness. 1973. _Natural vegetation of Oregon and Washington. Revised edition_. Oregon State Univer- sity Press, Corvallis. Hamet-Ahti, L. 1965. Notes on the vegetation zones of western Canada, with special reference to the forests of Wells-Gray Park, British Columbia. _Ann. Bot. Fenn._ 2: 274- 299 Ilvessalo, Y. 1929. Notes on some forest (site) types in North America. _Acta Forest. Fenn._ 34: 1-93. Klinka, K., H. Qian, J. Pojar, & D.V. Meidinger. 1996. Class- ification of natural forest communities of coastal British Columbia, Canada. _Vegetatio_ 125: 149-168. Knapp, R. 1957. Ueber die Gliederung der Vegetation von Nor- damerika. Hoehere Vegetationseinheiten. _Geobot. Mitt._ 4: 1- 63. Krajina, V. 1969. Ecology of forest trees in British Columbia. _Ecol. W. N. Amer._ 2/1: 1.146. Kujala, V. 1945. Waldvegetationsuntersuchungen in Kanada, mit besonderer Beruecksichtigung der Anbaumoeglichkeiten kanadis- cher Holzarten auf natuerlichen Waldboeden in Finnland. _Ann. Acad. Sci. Fenn. Ser. AIV Biol._ 7: 1-434. Meidinger, D.V. & J. Pojar (eds). 1991. _Ecosystems of British Columbia_. British Columbia Ministry of Forests Research Branch, Victoria. Peinado, M., J.L. Aguirre, & J. Delgadillo. 1997. Phytosociological, bioclimatic and biogeographical class- ification of woody climax communities of western North America. _J. Veg. Sci._ 8: 505-528. Peinado, M., J.L. Aguirre, & M. de la Cruz. 1998. A phytosociological survey of the boreal forest (_Vaccinio- Piceetea_) in North America. _Pl. Ecol._ 137: 151-202. Pfister, R.D. & S.F. Arno. 1980. Classifying forest habitat types based on potential climax vegetation. _Forest Sci._ 26: 52-70. Pfister, R.D.. B.L. Kovalchik, S.F. Arno, & R.C. Presby. 1977. _Forest habitat types of Montana_. USDA Forest Service, Intermountain Forest Range Experiment Station Gen. Techn. Rep. INT-34, Ogden. Pignatti, S. 1968. Die Inflation der hoeheren pflanzensoziologischen Einheiten. Pp. 85-88 in: Tuexen, R. (ed.), _Pflanzensoziologische Systematik, Bericht ueber das internationale Symposium in Stolzenau/Weser 1964_, Junk, Den Haag. Pojar, J., K. Klinka,.& D.V. Meidinger. 1987. Biogeoclimatic ecosystem classification in British Columbia. _Forest Ecol. Managem._ 22: 119-154. Rivas-Martinez, S., D. Sanchez-Mata, & M. Costa. 1999a. North American boreal and western temperate forest vegetation. (Syntaxonomical synopsis of the potential natural plant communities of North America, II). _Itinera Geobot_. 12: 5- 316. Rivas-Martinez S., D. Sanchez-Mata, & M. Costa. 1999b. North American new phytosociological classes. _Itinera Geobot_. 13: 349-352. Spribille, T., H.G. Stroh, & F.J. Triepke. 2001. Are habitat types compatible with floristically defined associations? _J. Veg. Sci._ 12: 791-796. Wellner, C.A. 1989. Classification of habitat types in the western United States. Pp. 7-21 in: Ferguson, D.E., P. Mor- gan, & F.D. Johnson (eds.), _Proceedings: Land class- ifications based on vegetation: applications for resource management, Moscow, ID, Nov. 17-19, 1987_, USDA Forest Serv- ice, Intermountain Research Station Gen. Techn. Report INT- 257, Ogden. ________________________________________________________________ Subscriptions: http://victoria.tc.ca/mailman/listinfo/ben-l Send submissions to aceska@victoria.tc.ca BEN is archived at http://www.ou.edu/cas/botany-micro/ben/ ________________________________________________________________ From aceska@victoria.tc.ca Thu Apr 8 09:16:07 2004 From: aceska@victoria.tc.ca (Adolf Ceska) Date: Thu, 8 Apr 2004 01:16:07 -0700 Subject: [BEN-L]BEN # 326 Message-ID: <000001c41d41$c25b0040$744606cf@HPLAPTOP001> BBBBB EEEEEE NN N ISSN 1188-603X BB B EE NNN N BBBBB EEEEE NN N N BOTANICAL BB B EE NN NN ELECTRONIC BBBBB EEEEEE NN N NEWS No. 326 April 8, 2004 aceska@victoria.tc.ca Victoria, B.C. ----------------------------------------------------------- Dr. A. Ceska, P.O.Box 8546, Victoria, B.C. Canada V8W 3S2 ----------------------------------------------------------- This issue of BEN is dedicated to my friend Dr. Zdenka Neuhauslova a prominent Czech botanist and phytosociologist, who celebrated her 70th birthday on April 4. Zdenka and her husband, the late Dr. Robert Neuhausl, initiated the international "_Vegetation Map of Europe_" project. ON THE STATUS OF PHYTOSOCIOLOGY AS A DISCIPLINE From: Joerg Ewald, Freising-Weihenstephan The _Vegetation Map of Europe_, coordinated from 1979-1991 by Robert Neuhausl from Prague and completed under the auspices of Germany's Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN), is a milestone of applied vegetation science. Hundreds of phytosociologists from 31 European countries contributed to this project at the turn of the millennium. Europe's potential natural vegetation is presented at the scale of 1:2.5 million (Bohn et al. 2000). The explanatory text and CD-ROM are in the process of publication; a sample map can be viewed interactively through the website Floraweb (http://www.synbiosys.alterra.nl/eu/) The map and its legend (ca. 700 units organised in 19 forma- tions) represent a first attempt to provide an ecologically meaningful phytosociological classification across national boundaries. This is but one outstanding example of the maturity of European vegetation science. Considering such an achievement, the news that there will be no successor after Dr. Bohn's retirement, and thus no continuation to his co-ordinating activities came as a shock. There is a definitive sense of crisis in phytosociologi- cal circles: it can't be denied that phytosociology as a naturalist, descriptive and generalist (i. e. genuinely inter- disciplinary) approach does have troubles positioning itself as a science, when the majority of biologists turn to molecular genetics and when the majority of the remaining organismal biologists turn to experiments and population models. Tragically, phytosociology has hardly gained visibility in recent biodiversity research, which has rapidly become the harbour for the various remnants of organismal biology worldwide. As a consequence, it hardly participates in large national and international funding initiatives. Some vegetation scientists may simply be reluctant to engage in the rat race of modern science and rather concentrate on applications of their science in local and regional conservation efforts. A remarkable number of regional botanical periodicals survive under the auspices of botanical societies and museums. However, young phytosociologists have to realize that publishing their results in these journals will hardly give them access to an academic career. Submitting manuscripts to international journals, they often find them disqualified as of local significance only. In turn, traditional journals are torn between the conflicting goals of their traditional readership and international recogni- tion. Of course, these conditions push the remaining academic phytosociologists away from classical work, both in terms of project acquisition and of educating young plant ecologists. This inevitable specialization occurs at the expense of typical strengths like broad knowledge of the flora, vegetation types, geology, pedology, landscape structure and history. In modern society, there appears to be a negative correlation between the amount of attention devoted to biodiversity and the actual skills of its recognition. This may be an inevitable process of maturation and progress. The task of classifying Central Europe's vegetation and record- ing its plant biodiversity is largely completed. There is no shortage of informative books on plants and plant communities. What is the point in challenging these fairly reliable systems time and time again? Isn't vegetation survey simply done and over with and must duly be replaced by more reductionist, predictive research strategies? If we think of biodiversity as something to be discovered, described and placed in a museum, then Central European phytosociology must be seen as a mere historical footnote. Yet such fatalism is based on a double misunderstanding: one is that phytosociology's ultimate goal is classification. The second is that the scientific fascination with biodiversity lies chiefly in discovering more of it. Phytosociology studies the "social life of plant species", that is their co-occurrence in space and time (Ewald 2003) and classification is but one method of analysing these patterns. In the mind of the plant ecologist and biogeographer, biodiversity research should be about understand- ing the historical and actualistic mechanisms behind diversity patterns. It is thus only the natural consequence that phytosociologists are now increasingly considering the mechanisms behind plant communities. A cross-sectional technique naturally offers a multitude of paths into neighbouring fields like ecosystem analysis, plant-animal interactions or population biology, sometimes even considered as parts of phytosociology in the broad sense. Such centrifugal forces may quickly dissolve our discipline beyond recognition . How can phytosociology avoid being over-stretched between oppos- ing forces of local application and global science? Can the centrifugal energy of specialization be deflected back into phytosociology as an integrative discipline? What is its genuine contribution to modern plant ecology and biodiversity research? The answer lies in phytosociology as a method: the releve? plot (a list of all visible plant species found in a location) and its multivariate analysis are at the heart of the matter. Releves have always been measurements of community richness (alpha diversity), vegetation tables are plots of beta- diver- sity (species turnover along gradients) and synoptic tables are summaries of gamma diversity (species pools, meta- communities). Thoroughly sampled plots and their skilful arrangement are the touchstone of good phytosociology. The European tradition of printing unreduced releves reflects the value placed upon original data in the phytosociological community. The reader is enabled to evaluate the quality of the proposed classification, and to reject it, if necessary, on the grounds that it needs re- analysis. Publishing ever more releves has created a vast legacy of data that is shared by the community of phytosociologists. In the process of re-analysis, many older plot data have been used to underpin alternative classifications, as in the several editions of Oberdorfer's conspectus (1957, 1992). However, the accession, handling and administration of these data - in fact, the begin- nings of biodiversity informatics - have been extremely tedious in the pre-digital age, usually reducing the critical re- analysis of larger datasets to a theoretical option. Millions of releves have been digitized in various sorts of electronic databases, and yet political, institutional and scientific obstacles severely limit their widespread use (Ewald 2001). Phytosociological data are more complex than one may think at first sight: at their core they report gathering events (sensu Berendsohn et al. 1999, the recording of a releve) by relating keys for plant taxa to an abundance scale and to plot information (often called header data). TURBOVEG (Hennekens & Schaminee 2001) was the first widely used software providing a structure taylored to phytosociology. However, the challenge of managing alternative taxonomies of plants and of vegetation types remains largely unresolved, imposing tight limits on exchange between existing databases. These problems underpin the need for a sound reference model for vegetation data (see ESA's vegbank datastructure: http://www.bio.unc.edu/faculty/peet/vegdata/ ) which will re- quire continued research and collaboration with taxonomists and software engineers. Biodiversity informatics has become crucial for the future of phytosociology (see IAVS Working Group for Ecoinformatics: http://vegbank.org/vegbank/general/info.html ). Modernising the tools for managing its resource, the plot legacy, phytosociology will also become more efficient in reach- ing its proximate goal of providing a widely accepted stable syntaxonomy. In the future descriptive and syntaxonomical publi- cations should be accompanied by depositing the underlying releve? material in public electronic archives, thus making vegetation classification and analysis transparent and repeatable in the strict sense of the word. This means no more and no less than taking our traditional appreciation of releve? data to the Internet age. Even more promise lies in exchanging scientific hypotheses and the data to test them among the various branches of plant ecol- ogy. Spatially and temporally explicit releves contribute to floristic databases. Phytosociological and trait databases are a perfect match for studying plant functional types (e. g. Pillar & Sosinski 2003) and their implications for management. Geographical information systems are an invaluable source to retrieve enviromental information for phytosociological analyses (e.g., Ohmann & Spies 1998). Combining composition, distribu- tion, function and environment, vegetation models are probably the most integrating application of plant biodiversity infor- matics. If one appreciates its genuine contribution to biodiversity informatics, phytosociology can - instead of disappearing in the vastness of plant ecological research - carry its tradition and founding principles into modernity. If this is realised (as projected in the European SynBioSys project - http://ice.zadi.de/floraweb/pnv/index.htm ), Bohn et al.'s map will become what it deserves to be: a milestone, not an endpoint. References Berendsohn, W.G., A. Anagnostopoulos, G. Hagedorn, J. Jakupovic, P.L. Nimis, B. Valdes, A. Guentsch, R.J. Pankhurst, & R.J. White. 1999. A comprehensive reference model for biological collections and surveys. _Taxon_ 48: 511-562. Bohn, U., G. Gollub, C. Hettwer, Z. Neuhauslova, H. Schlueter, & H. Weber. 2003. _Karte der natuerlichen Vegetation Europas. Map of the natural vegetation of Europe_. Federal Agency for Nature Conservation, Bonn. Ewald, J. 2001. Der Beitrag pflanzensoziologischer Datenbanken zur vegetationsoekologischen Forschung. _Berichte der Rein- hold Tuexen-Gesellschaft_ 13: 53-69. Ewald, J. 2003. A critique for phytosociology. _Journal of Vegetation Science_ 14: 291-296. Hennekens, S. & J.H.J. Schaminee. 2001. TURBOVEG, a comprehen- sive data base management system for vegetation data. _Jour- nal of Vegetation Science_ 12: 589-591. Oberdorfer, E. 1957. Sueddeutsche Pflanzengesellschaften. Gustav Fischer, Jena. Oberdorfer, E. 1992. Sueddeutsche Pflanzengesellschaften, Teil IV. Waelder und Gebuesche. Eugen Ulmer, Stuttgart. Ohmann, J.L., & T.A. Spies. 1998. Regional gradient analysis and spatial pattern of woody plant communities of Oregon forests. Ecological Monographs 68: 151-182. Pillar, V.D., & E.E. Sosinski Jr. 2003. An improved method for searching plant functional types by numerical analysis. _Journal of Vegetation Science_ 14: 323-332. BOOK REVIEW: MAP OF NATURAL VEGETATION OF EUROPE From: Hans Roemer [hlroemer@shaw.ca] Bohn U., Neuhausl R., unter Mitarbeit von Gollub G., Hettwer C., Neuhauslova Z., Schlueter H. et Weber H. 2000/2003. Map of the Natural Vegetation of Europe. Scale 1 : 2,500,000. A monumental cooperative project has just been completed with the publication of the Map of the Natural Vegetation of Europe. The printed work comes in three parts: 1) A map volume with 9 map sheets at 1:2,500,000 and one over- view map at 1:10,000,000. 2) A 153 page Legend volume (German and English). 3) The 654 page Explanatory Text volume. The map volume has an additional color-keyed legend sheet which shows aggregated map units, while the legend in book form has further details (i.e. including the letter/number subunits shown on the maps separated by thin lines, but not distinguished by color). Altogether, the mapping contains 698 mapping units and there are some 170 different colors. The Explanatory volume contains another 13 maps on topics including floral and geographical realms, various excerpt maps for specific vegeta- tion complexes, and one CD ROM (see below). The mapping comprises an area including Iceland in the northwest, Novaja Zemlya in the northeast, the Caspian Sea and Caucasus in the southeast, and the Iberian Peninsula in the southwest. The classification underlying the mapping is hierarchical, with vegetation formations the first principle of organization, followed by plant geographical and eventually ecological criteria. Nineteen main formations are described which are subdivided into the ultimate 698 units. The mapping portrays the potential natural vegetation, rather than current modifications and successional stages caused by human management. The Explanatory volume describes mainly the vegetation forma- tions, but also the history of the international initiative, the general principles and underlying classification for the map- ping, and the geological and vegetation history of the map area. Each of the main formations has a thorough treatment of its typological delimitation, geographical distribution, structure and physiognomy, species combination, syntaxonomy, climate, site conditions, landscape context, state of preservation, land uses, successional and disclimax stages, and formal conservation status/designations. Compressed vegetation tables are presented for many of the more well-researched vegetation units. This volume also has 148 excellent color photographs for a selection of well-preserved vegetation units as well as 23 figures and diagrams. An extensive bibliography of regional and country mapping projects, a list of scientific collaborators, synonymy lists and taxonomic comments complete the volume. Besides the specialized excerpt maps, the back pocket also carries the CD ROM. The main contents of the CD ROM are very detailed data sheets for each of the 698 mapping units. Further there is a comprehensive bibliography keyed to the map units, a complete list of the plant species mentioned anywhere in this work's different components, a glossary, and a list of contributors to the mapping. The data sheets have some information in common with the Explanatory volume, but are more specific for the mapping units and considerably more detailed where the source information allowed this. The CD ROM contents forms a data base which is searchable by vegetation units and by the name of any plant species mentioned in the data sheets. For instance, a search for Iris pumila (there are 17 species of Iris listed) leads you to three dif- ferent vegetation units, L7: West Caucasian meadow steppes, L16: Crimean herb-grass steppes, and M16: West and central Pontic desert steppes. The last of these occurs on and near the Crimean Peninsula. Search results for it reveal a species combination of some 20 grasses, subshrubs, herbs and geophytes dominated by _Stipa_, _Festuca_ and _Artemisia_ species. As an example of floristic detail, we learn that _Cladonia rangiformis_, _C. subrangiformis_, _Parmelia ryssola_, _P. vagans_, _Cornicularia steppae_, and _Tortula ruralis_ form a moss/lichen layer. About two pages of additional ecological, structure, synsystematic, geographical, soil, climate and distributional information are available on the M16 data sheet. Searching for a more widespread species, _Festuca_ heterophylla (there are 98 species of _Fes- tuca_ that are searchable!), results in a list of 17 mapping units. The mapping and legend portions of this work are fully func- tional in both German and English. However the explanatory volume is in German only and so is the CD ROM at present. However, a new interactive version of the CD ROM is promised "for 2003" which will also be issued in English and will be redesigned to solicit feedback on those vegetation units that require further work to bring them up to the central European standard of detail. This publication is the product of intensive scientific col- laboration over a twenty-year period involving experts from 31 European countries and the Caucasus states. International col- laboration started in earnest as a result of a colloquium held in 1979 in Bohemia, but attempts to work towards a Europe- wide vegetation map existed even earlier. From 1979 Dr. Robert Neuhausl of Czechoslovakia became the leading proponent and coordinator for this project. After his death in 1991 his wife, Dr. Zdenka Neuhauslova carried on his work in collaboration with the new coordinator, Dr. Udo Bohn of the German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation in Bonn. Much of the map is based on pre-existing vegetation maps of the individual countries and regions involved (a bibliography of these maps is provided in the Explanatory volume). By necessity, these maps were of various degrees of detail and based on a variety of class- ification systems. Coordination, correlation and boundary match- ing of these maps must have been a horrendous task to perform. However, the elegance of the final product certainly belies these obvious difficulties! Congratulations for this achievement are due to the coordinator, the authors, and the scientific collaborators, especially those who worked on this project during the time of political adver- sity before the fall of the iron courtain. Explanatory Text (German) with CD ROM. ISBN 3-7843-3837-2 Eur 38.00 Maps and Legend volumes (German and English)ISBN 3-7843- 3809-7 Eur 16.00 Order from: BfN-Schriftenvertrieb im Landwirtschaftsverlag 48084 Muenster, Germany http://www.1v-h.de/bfn FOOTNOTE TO "MAP OF THE NATURAL VEGETATION OF EUROPE": INTERACTIVE ENGLISH CD VERSION IN THE WORKS The monumental mapping project for the European continent will soon be available in an interactive, bilingual English/German CD-ROM package. A preview of this CD was given at a recent vegetation database workshop near Munich, and it is very impressive. Not only will there be linked, query-able datasheets for the 698 different mapping units, these are in turn linked to an interactive spa- tial display very reminiscent of ArcView. One can zoom into and out of the various regions, click coverages on and off, clip and paste, click on units to be connected with datasheets, photos of vegetation types or chapters of the explanatory text, and sort data within the datasheets according to the user's criteria - and all in this in English, if that is your language of choice. This will be a major research and teaching tool and a sig- nificant contribution towards understanding vegetation patterns and setting conservation priorities at the European level. English-speaking users would be well served to wait for this version, which is promised within the next 2-4 months from the German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN) (http://www.bfn.de). BIOGEOCLIMATIC MAPS FOR BRITISH COLUMBIA From: Del Meidinger [Del.Meidinger@gems2.gov.bc.ca] The Ministry of Forests Research Branch recently posted files of Biogeoclimatic Subzone/Variant maps at a scale of (1:250,000 or 1:300,000) for the entire province. These maps are available in Adobe Acrobat (pdf) format and can be accessed from the follow- ing website: http://www.for.gov.bc.ca/hre/becweb/mapping.htm#getting (go to "Subzone Variant Mapping at a District Scale"). There are 2 series of maps, one with a full base designed for use in the field and one with a shaded relief background designed as a wall map. These maps cover the entire 950,000 kmė of British Columbia. There are 14 biogeoclimatic zones and about 192 mapped subzones or variants (units are mapped to the lowest recognized biogeoclimatic unit). Digital files of biogeoclimatic units for use in GIS modelling are also available at this web site. Field guides that present the classification of ecosystems within a biogeoclimatic unit are available for most subzones/variants. See the links to various guides beginning with "A field guide for site identification and interpretation" at http://www.for.gov.bc.ca/hfd/pubs/Lmh.htm BOOK REVIEW: CIRCUMBOREAL CONIFEROUS FORESTS From: Marcel Rejmanek [mrejmanek@ucdavis.edu] This review will be published in Madrono; permission to post it in BEN was granted by both the author and the journal. Vegetation of circumboreal coniferous forests. Edited by Milan Chytry and Toby Spribille. 2002. OPULUS Press, Uppsala, Sweden. 184 pp. EUR 30.00 ISBN 91-88716-27-9. Order from: http://www.opuluspress.se/ The coniferous forests of Eurasia and North America represent one of the largest vegetation formations in the world, occupying approximately 19 million km2. The centers of biodiversity of these forests are in eastern Asia and western North America. However, despite their vast size and environmental significance, boreal forests have received comparatively little attention from phytosociologists. Their continuous distribution across the northern hemisphere points to the need for international cooperation in comparative studies and prioritization of par- ticular areas for conservation. In order to facilitate such cooperation, a workshop entitled "_Vegetation Classification and Phytogeography of Circumboreal Coniferous Forests_" was held in association with the 44th Symposium of the International As- sociation for Vegetation Science in Freising-Weihenstephan, Germany, in 2001. The volume under review took shape at this workshop. It proves that finding a common platform for an under- standing of the circumboreal coniferous biome is a realistic goal. Representation of relevant geographical areas is reasonably balanced: two chapters on European coniferous forests, two on forests in Asia, and two on forests in British Columbia, the American Northwest, and the Rocky Mountains. Toby Spribille and Alina Stachurska-Swakon wrote chapters on classification of North American coniferous forests. As it has already been ap- parent from his earlier writings (1999, 2000, 2001), Spribille emerges as a leader in American phytosociology. His elaborated descriptions of forest communities (bryophytes and lichens are included) and their classification into floristically defined associations, alliances, and orders match international stand- ards and follow rules of the International Code of Phytosociological Nomenclature (Weber et al. 2000). In the two mentioned chapters, over 700 releves were used for identifica- tion of 35 associations of which 13 were described for the first time. Also, one new alliance and one new order were validly published here. We should appreciate validation of several old names in these chapters. This is a commendable habit that helps to maintain links to earlier studies and prevents accumulation of unnecessary synonyms. The only critical comment that I can make is probably not com- pletely fair at this stage of development of phytosociology in North America (and, for the same reason in Asia), but it still should be spelled out: more attention should be paid to soil and climate characterization of individual syntaxa. So far, qualita- tive statements about soil moisture, longitudinal and al- titudinal range, slope, and cover in individual strata is usually all what is provided. In Europe, phytosociology has been walking hand in hand with soil science since the very beginning when Josias Braun-Blanquet started working with Hans Jenny in the Alps in the early 1920's. Currently, an unresolved issue is whether boreal coniferous forests in North American belong to the class (the highest vegetation classification unit) _Vaccinio-Piceetea_, originally described by Braun-Blanquet and his colleagues from the Alps. Many circumboreal elements of these forests (_Galium boreale_, _Linnaea borealis_, _Listera cordata_, _Lycopodium_ spp., _Moneses uniflora_, _Orthilia secunda_, _Pleurozium schreberi_, _Rhytidiadelphus loreus_, _Vaccinium uliginosum_, etc.) provide the justification for one circumboreal class. However, the paucity of traditional _Vaccinio-Piceetea_ species in the forests of the alliance _Tsugion mertensianae_, known from subalpine habitats in Oregon, Idaho and British Columbia, makes this question more complicated. Chapter by Milan Chytry (Czech Republic) and his colleagues from Austria and Slovakia deals with the Central European _Picea abies_ forests. This chapter deserves a special attention. It addresses a nagging question of inconsistent approaches to the designation of diagnostic species. Using 20,164 releves from the Central European forests, they concluded that lists of diagnos- tic species published in phytosociological literature are heavily context-dependent. Some of these lists are useful for identification of vegetation units at a local scale, while others for distinguishing units within a narrowly delimited community type over a large area. Therefore, the application of published lists of diagnostic species outside of the context (the underlying data sets and range of comparisons) should be done only with an explicit understanding of this context. Two recent attempts to classify vegetation in the western USA have been, for many different reasons, unsatisfactory; for critical evaluations see Keil (1997), Rejmanek (1997), Spribille and Ceska (2002), and Zedler (1997). As a contrast, North American studies in this volume, as well as studies by Manuel Peinado and his colleagues (1997, 1998), represent a definitive starting points of, and models for, professional vegetation classification in this part of the world. Because now, after a long period of neglect, the need for vegetation classification is clearly recognized in the U.S. (http://www.esa.org/vegweb/NVC_guidelines_v3.pdf), this volume should be available, at least, in all professional libraries. References Keil, D. J. 1997. A Manual of California Vegetation [review]. _Systematic Botany_ 22: 410-411. Peinado, M., J.L. Aguirre, & J. Delgadillo. 1997. Phytosociological, bioclimatic and biogeographical class- ification of woody climax communities of western North America. _Journal of Vegetation Science_ 8: 505-528. Peinado, M., J.L. Aguirre, & M. de la Cruz. 1998. A phytosociological survey of the boreal forests (_Vaccinio- Piceetea) in North America_. Plant Ecology 137: 151-202. Rejmanek, M. 1997. Vegetation classification: shortcuts lead nowhere. _Global Ecology and Biogeography Letters_ 6: 164- 165. Spribille, T. 1999. Forest vegetation in the northern Salish Mountains of northwestern Montana (U.S.A.). _Phytoc- coenologia_ 29: 503-577. Spribille, T. 2000. Clarification regarding the paper "Forest vegetation in the northern Salish Mountains of northwestern Montana (U.S.A.)". _Phytocoenologia_ 30: 143-144. Spribille, T. and A. Ceska. 2002. North American Boreal and Western Temperate Forest Vegetation [review]. _Journal of Vegetation Science_ 13: 749-750. See also: http://www.ou.edu/cas/botany-micro/ben/ben276.html Spribille, T., H.G. Stroh, & F.J. Triepke. 2001. Are habitat types compatible with floristically defined associations? _Journal of Vegetation Science_ 12: 791-796. Weber, H.E., J. Moravec, & J.-P. Theurillat, 2000. International code of phytosociological nomenclature. 3rd ed. _Journal of Vegetation Science_ 11: 739-768. Zedler, P. H. 1997. A Manual of California Vegetation [review]. _Madrono_ 44: 214-219 MOUNTAIN FORESTS OF NORTHWESTERN NORTH AMERICA From: Spribille, Toby. 2002. The mountain forests of British Columbia and the American Northwest: Floristic patterns and syntaxonomy. _Folia Geobotanica_ 37: 475-508. Introduction, and syntaxonomical units. [Permission to post this in BEN granted by both the author and the _Folia Geobotanica_.] The forests of northwestern North America have been extensively inventoried and classified. The systems of classification used in this region, however, are not always well understood in other parts of the world. Primarily two approaches to forest class- ification have been employed. In the United States, habitat typology, a forest site classification system based on concepts of succession and climax (Pfister & Arno 1980), has enjoyed widespread acceptance. In western Canada, a three-tiered ap- proach to site and vegetation inventory known as biogeoclimatic ecosystem classification (Krajina 1969, Pojar et al. 1987) is used. These systems were set up largely to facilitate regional ecosystem mapping and silvicultural management of forested lands. In both cases, the systems have proven well-suited to their stated goals. However, they are for various reasons not directly compatible with syntaxonomic systems used elsewhere (Spribille et al. 2001). This has carried with it the disad- vantage of making most research tied to these ecosystems less accessible to vegetation science as a whole. Notwithstanding this drawback, vegetation inventory efforts in northwestern North America have provided an abundance of data on the floristic composition of the forests. High quality phytosociological releves have been gathered in the thousands for the preparation of forest habitat type classifications in the western United States (Wellner 1989). In British Columbia, similar numbers of releves have been sampled for the construc- tion of forest site identification manuals by the provincial Ministry of Forests (Meidinger & Pojar 1991). Graduate and doctoral theses and dissertations completed on various vegeta- tion types over the past 50 years provide yet another sig- nificant source of phytosociological data. Many of these are, however, unpublished and little known. Several syntaxonomic and physiognomic overviews of the forest vegetation of parts or all of northwestern North America have been presented (e.g., Ilvessalo 1929, Kujala 1945, Knapp 1957, Hamet-Ahti 1965, Krajina 1969, Franklin & Dyrness 1973, Pfister et al. 1977, Meidinger & Pojar 1991, Klinka et al. 1996, Peinado et al. 1997, 1998, Rivas-Mart­nez et al. 1999a,b). These works have provided valuable synopses of the composition, climate, ecology and geographic extent of the forest communities of the region. However, they have only rarely built on each other. This is especially true of syntaxonomic proposals. If one includes the lowland _Pseudotsuga menziesii_ forests not treated here, this practice has resulted in the description of no fewer than 5 classes, 20 orders, 56 alliances and over 110 associations from forests in the region. It is important to note that this tally does not include the numerous site associations described within the framework of biogeoclimatic ecosystem classification in British Columbia, nor the many habitat types and associations described by forest workers in the American Pacific Northwest. Clearly, the region has experienced a veritable explosion. in the number of described syntaxa, not unlike that seen in Europe four decades ago (Pignatti 1968). In northwestern North America, however, the syntaxa are described in three different syn- taxonomic languages. Notwithstanding the differing names applied to these com- munities, existing overviews of the forest vegetation of northwestern North America almost invariably recognize the existence of the same major forest formations. In general terms, eight of these can be recognized. In order from oceanic to continental, these include 1. coastal temperate rainforests dominated by _Picea sitchen- sis_ and _Tsuga heterophylla_, 2. coastal temperate forests dominated by _Pseudotsuga menziesii_, _Thuja plicata_, _Tsuga heterophylla_ or _Alnus rubra_, 3. coastal montane to subalpine forests dominated by _Tsuga mertensiana_, _Abies amabilis_ and _Chamaecyparis nootkatensis_, 4. inland moist temperate forests dominated by _Thuja plicata_ and _Tsuga heterophylla_, 5. inland montane to subalpine forests dominated by _Abies lasiocarpa_ and _Picea engelmannii_, 6. southern boreal forests of _Pinus contorta_, _Abies lasiocarpa_ and _Picea glauca_ in the transition zone to the boreal biome, 7. dry inland forests, dominated by _Pseudotsuga menziesii_ var. _glauca_ or _Larix occidentalis_, and finally 8. _Pinus ponderosa_ steppe forests. The major differences between the existing classification schemes lie in how the individual formations are delimited, in how they are considered to relate to each other and to other forest formations elsewhere in the world, and lastly, in how they are named. Creating a platform for scientific exchange across international boundaries is one of the overarching objec- tives of phytosociological syntaxonomy. This paper is the first installment of a syntaxonomic revision of the coniferous forests of northwestern North America. Here, the main objective will be to examine communities most closely related to the circumboreal coniferous forests. These include the coastal and inland montane and subalpine forests summarized in (3) to (6) above. These forests have in common not only similarities in floristic com- position, but also occurrence at middle to upper elevations, cool, short summers and moderate to high annual precipitation. _Tsugion mertensianae_ _Rubo-Tsugetum mertensianae_ _Vaccinio-Tsugetum mertensianae_ _Cladothamno-Tsugetum mertensianae_ _Abieti amabilis-Tsugetum mertensianae_ _Rhododendro-Abietetum lasiocarpae_ _Abieti lasiocarpae-Tsugetum mertensianae_ _Angelico-Abietetum bifoliae_ _Luzulo-Abietetum bifoliae_ _Menziesio-Abietetum bifoliae_ _Xerophyllo-Pinetum albicaulis_ _Abieti-Tsugion heterophyllae_ _Arnico-Abietetum bifoliae_ _Ledo-Piceetum engelmannii_ _Xerophyllo-Abietetum bifoliae_ _Thuja plicata-Tsuga heterophylla_ forest _Pino latifoliae-Piceetum marianae_ _Vaccinio-Piceetum albertianae_ _Pleurozio-Tsugetum heterophyllae_ _Gymnocarpio-Abietion_ _Piceo-Tsugetum heterophyllae_ _Gymnocarpio disjuncti-Thujetum plicatae_ _Streptopo streptopoidis-Tsugetum heterophyllae_ _Gymnocarpio-Abietetum lasiocarpae_ _Rubo-Piceetum sitchensis_ _ Tsugo mertensianae-Piceetum sitchensis_ _Oplopanaco-Thujetum plicatae_ _Lysichito-Chamaecyparidion nootkatensis_ _Lysichito-Chamaecyparidetum nootkatensis_ References Franklin, J.F.. & C.T. Dyrness. 1973. _Natural vegetation of Oregon and Washington. Revised edition_. Oregon State Univer- sity Press, Corvallis. Hamet-Ahti, L. 1965. Notes on the vegetation zones of western Canada, with special reference to the forests of Wells-Gray Park, British Columbia. _Ann. Bot. Fenn._ 2: 274- 299 Ilvessalo, Y. 1929. Notes on some forest (site) types in North America. _Acta Forest. Fenn._ 34: 1-93. Klinka, K., H. Qian, J. Pojar, & D.V. Meidinger. 1996. Class- ification of natural forest communities of coastal British Columbia, Canada. _Vegetatio_ 125: 149-168. Knapp, R. 1957. Ueber die Gliederung der Vegetation von Nor- damerika. Hoehere Vegetationseinheiten. _Geobot. Mitt._ 4: 1- 63. Krajina, V. 1969. Ecology of forest trees in British Columbia. _Ecol. W. N. Amer._ 2/1: 1.146. Kujala, V. 1945. Waldvegetationsuntersuchungen in Kanada, mit besonderer Beruecksichtigung der Anbaumoeglichkeiten kanadis- cher Holzarten auf natuerlichen Waldboeden in Finnland. _Ann. Acad. Sci. Fenn. Ser. AIV Biol._ 7: 1-434. Meidinger, D.V. & J. Pojar (eds). 1991. _Ecosystems of British Columbia_. British Columbia Ministry of Forests Research Branch, Victoria. Peinado, M., J.L. Aguirre, & J. Delgadillo. 1997. Phytosociological, bioclimatic and biogeographical class- ification of woody climax communities of western North America. _J. Veg. Sci._ 8: 505-528. Peinado, M., J.L. Aguirre, & M. de la Cruz. 1998. A phytosociological survey of the boreal forest (_Vaccinio- Piceetea_) in North America. _Pl. Ecol._ 137: 151-202. Pfister, R.D. & S.F. Arno. 1980. Classifying forest habitat types based on potential climax vegetation. _Forest Sci._ 26: 52-70. Pfister, R.D.. B.L. Kovalchik, S.F. Arno, & R.C. Presby. 1977. _Forest habitat types of Montana_. USDA Forest Service, Intermountain Forest Range Experiment Station Gen. Techn. Rep. INT-34, Ogden. Pignatti, S. 1968. Die Inflation der hoeheren pflanzensoziologischen Einheiten. Pp. 85-88 in: Tuexen, R. (ed.), _Pflanzensoziologische Systematik, Bericht ueber das internationale Symposium in Stolzenau/Weser 1964_, Junk, Den Haag. Pojar, J., K. Klinka,.& D.V. Meidinger. 1987. Biogeoclimatic ecosystem classification in British Columbia. _Forest Ecol. Managem._ 22: 119-154. Rivas-Martinez, S., D. Sanchez-Mata, & M. Costa. 1999a. North American boreal and western temperate forest vegetation. (Syntaxonomical synopsis of the potential natural plant communities of North America, II). _Itinera Geobot_. 12: 5- 316. Rivas-Martinez S., D. Sanchez-Mata, & M. Costa. 1999b. North American new phytosociological classes. _Itinera Geobot_. 13: 349-352. Spribille, T., H.G. Stroh, & F.J. Triepke. 2001. Are habitat types compatible with floristically defined associations? _J. Veg. Sci._ 12: 791-796. Wellner, C.A. 1989. Classification of habitat types in the western United States. Pp. 7-21 in: Ferguson, D.E., P. Mor- gan, & F.D. Johnson (eds.), _Proceedings: Land class- ifications based on vegetation: applications for resource management, Moscow, ID, Nov. 17-19, 1987_, USDA Forest Serv- ice, Intermountain Research Station Gen. Techn. Report INT- 257, Ogden. ________________________________________________________________ Subscriptions: http://victoria.tc.ca/mailman/listinfo/ben-l Send submissions to aceska@victoria.tc.ca BEN is archived at http://www.ou.edu/cas/botany-micro/ben/ ________________________________________________________________ From aceska@victoria.tc.ca Thu Apr 8 08:57:12 2004 From: aceska@victoria.tc.ca (Adolf Ceska) Date: Thu, 8 Apr 2004 00:57:12 -0700 Subject: [BEN-L]BEN # 326 Message-ID: <000001c41d3f$1e63f930$744606cf@HPLAPTOP001> BBBBB EEEEEE NN N ISSN 1188-603X BB B EE NNN N BBBBB EEEEE NN N N BOTANICAL BB B EE NN NN ELECTRONIC BBBBB EEEEEE NN N NEWS No. 326 April 7, 2003 aceska@victoria.tc.ca Victoria, B.C. ----------------------------------------------------------- Dr. A. Ceska, P.O.Box 8546, Victoria, B.C. Canada V8W 3S2 ----------------------------------------------------------- This issue of BEN is dedicated to my friend Dr. Zdenka Neuhauslova a prominent Czech botanist and phytosociologist, who celebrated her 70th birthday on April 4. Zdenka and her husband, the late Dr. Robert Neuhausl, initiated the international "_Vegetation Map of Europe_" project. ON THE STATUS OF PHYTOSOCIOLOGY AS A DISCIPLINE From: Joerg Ewald, Freising-Weihenstephan The _Vegetation Map of Europe_, coordinated from 1979-1991 by Robert Neuhausl from Prague and completed under the auspices of Germany's Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN), is a milestone of applied vegetation science. Hundreds of phytosociologists from 31 European countries contributed to this project at the turn of the millennium. Europe's potential natural vegetation is presented at the scale of 1:2.5 million (Bohn et al. 2000). The explanatory text and CD-ROM are in the process of publication; a sample map can be viewed interactively through the website Floraweb (http://www.synbiosys.alterra.nl/eu/) The map and its legend (ca. 700 units organised in 19 forma- tions) represent a first attempt to provide an ecologically meaningful phytosociological classification across national boundaries. This is but one outstanding example of the maturity of European vegetation science. Considering such an achievement, the news that there will be no successor after Dr. Bohn's retirement, and thus no continuation to his co-ordinating activities came as a shock. There is a definitive sense of crisis in phytosociologi- cal circles: it can't be denied that phytosociology as a naturalist, descriptive and generalist (i. e. genuinely inter- disciplinary) approach does have troubles positioning itself as a science, when the majority of biologists turn to molecular genetics and when the majority of the remaining organismal biologists turn to experiments and population models. Tragically, phytosociology has hardly gained visibility in recent biodiversity research, which has rapidly become the harbour for the various remnants of organismal biology worldwide. As a consequence, it hardly participates in large national and international funding initiatives. Some vegetation scientists may simply be reluctant to engage in the rat race of modern science and rather concentrate on applications of their science in local and regional conservation efforts. A remarkable number of regional botanical periodicals survive under the auspices of botanical societies and museums. However, young phytosociologists have to realize that publishing their results in these journals will hardly give them access to an academic career. Submitting manuscripts to international journals, they often find them disqualified as of local significance only. In turn, traditional journals are torn between the conflicting goals of their traditional readership and international recogni- tion. Of course, these conditions push the remaining academic phytosociologists away from classical work, both in terms of project acquisition and of educating young plant ecologists. This inevitable specialization occurs at the expense of typical strengths like broad knowledge of the flora, vegetation types, geology, pedology, landscape structure and history. In modern society, there appears to be a negative correlation between the amount of attention devoted to biodiversity and the actual skills of its recognition. This may be an inevitable process of maturation and progress. The task of classifying Central Europe's vegetation and record- ing its plant biodiversity is largely completed. There is no shortage of informative books on plants and plant communities. What is the point in challenging these fairly reliable systems time and time again? Isn't vegetation survey simply done and over with and must duly be replaced by more reductionist, predictive research strategies? If we think of biodiversity as something to be discovered, described and placed in a museum, then Central European phytosociology must be seen as a mere historical footnote. Yet such fatalism is based on a double misunderstanding: one is that phytosociology's ultimate goal is classification. The second is that the scientific fascination with biodiversity lies chiefly in discovering more of it. Phytosociology studies the "social life of plant species", that is their co-occurrence in space and time (Ewald 2003) and classification is but one method of analysing these patterns. In the mind of the plant ecologist and biogeographer, biodiversity research should be about understand- ing the historical and actualistic mechanisms behind diversity patterns. It is thus only the natural consequence that phytosociologists are now increasingly considering the mechanisms behind plant communities. A cross-sectional technique naturally offers a multitude of paths into neighbouring fields like ecosystem analysis, plant-animal interactions or population biology, sometimes even considered as parts of phytosociology in the broad sense. Such centrifugal forces may quickly dissolve our discipline beyond recognition . How can phytosociology avoid being over-stretched between oppos- ing forces of local application and global science? Can the centrifugal energy of specialization be deflected back into phytosociology as an integrative discipline? What is its genuine contribution to modern plant ecology and biodiversity research? The answer lies in phytosociology as a method: the releve? plot (a list of all visible plant species found in a location) and its multivariate analysis are at the heart of the matter. Releves have always been measurements of community richness (alpha diversity), vegetation tables are plots of beta- diver- sity (species turnover along gradients) and synoptic tables are summaries of gamma diversity (species pools, meta- communities). Thoroughly sampled plots and their skilful arrangement are the touchstone of good phytosociology. The European tradition of printing unreduced releves reflects the value placed upon original data in the phytosociological community. The reader is enabled to evaluate the quality of the proposed classification, and to reject it, if necessary, on the grounds that it needs re- analysis. Publishing ever more releves has created a vast legacy of data that is shared by the community of phytosociologists. In the process of re-analysis, many older plot data have been used to underpin alternative classifications, as in the several editions of Oberdorfer's conspectus (1957, 1992). However, the accession, handling and administration of these data - in fact, the begin- nings of biodiversity informatics - have been extremely tedious in the pre-digital age, usually reducing the critical re- analysis of larger datasets to a theoretical option. Millions of releves have been digitized in various sorts of electronic databases, and yet political, institutional and scientific obstacles severely limit their widespread use (Ewald 2001). Phytosociological data are more complex than one may think at first sight: at their core they report gathering events (sensu Berendsohn et al. 1999, the recording of a releve) by relating keys for plant taxa to an abundance scale and to plot information (often called header data). TURBOVEG (Hennekens & Schaminee 2001) was the first widely used software providing a structure taylored to phytosociology. However, the challenge of managing alternative taxonomies of plants and of vegetation types remains largely unresolved, imposing tight limits on exchange between existing databases. These problems underpin the need for a sound reference model for vegetation data (see ESA's vegbank datastructure: http://www.bio.unc.edu/faculty/peet/vegdata/ ) which will re- quire continued research and collaboration with taxonomists and software engineers. Biodiversity informatics has become crucial for the future of phytosociology (see IAVS Working Group for Ecoinformatics: http://vegbank.org/vegbank/general/info.html ). Modernising the tools for managing its resource, the plot legacy, phytosociology will also become more efficient in reach- ing its proximate goal of providing a widely accepted stable syntaxonomy. In the future descriptive and syntaxonomical publi- cations should be accompanied by depositing the underlying releve? material in public electronic archives, thus making vegetation classification and analysis transparent and repeatable in the strict sense of the word. This means no more and no less than taking our traditional appreciation of releve? data to the Internet age. Even more promise lies in exchanging scientific hypotheses and the data to test them among the various branches of plant ecol- ogy. Spatially and temporally explicit releves contribute to floristic databases. Phytosociological and trait databases are a perfect match for studying plant functional types (e. g. Pillar & Sosinski 2003) and their implications for management. Geographical information systems are an invaluable source to retrieve enviromental information for phytosociological analyses (e.g., Ohmann & Spies 1998). Combining composition, distribu- tion, function and environment, vegetation models are probably the most integrating application of plant biodiversity infor- matics. If one appreciates its genuine contribution to biodiversity informatics, phytosociology can - instead of disappearing in the vastness of plant ecological research - carry its tradition and founding principles into modernity. If this is realised (as projected in the European SynBioSys project - http://ice.zadi.de/floraweb/pnv/index.htm ), Bohn et al.'s map will become what it deserves to be: a milestone, not an endpoint. References Berendsohn, W.G., A. Anagnostopoulos, G. Hagedorn, J. Jakupovic, P.L. Nimis, B. Valdes, A. Guentsch, R.J. Pankhurst, & R.J. White. 1999. A comprehensive reference model for biological collections and surveys. _Taxon_ 48: 511-562. Bohn, U., G. Gollub, C. Hettwer, Z. Neuhauslova, H. Schlueter, & H. Weber. 2003. _Karte der natuerlichen Vegetation Europas. Map of the natural vegetation of Europe_. Federal Agency for Nature Conservation, Bonn. Ewald, J. 2001. Der Beitrag pflanzensoziologischer Datenbanken zur vegetationsoekologischen Forschung. _Berichte der Rein- hold Tuexen-Gesellschaft_ 13: 53-69. Ewald, J. 2003. A critique for phytosociology. _Journal of Vegetation Science_ 14: 291-296. Hennekens, S. & J.H.J. Schaminee. 2001. TURBOVEG, a comprehen- sive data base management system for vegetation data. _Jour- nal of Vegetation Science_ 12: 589-591. Oberdorfer, E. 1957. Sueddeutsche Pflanzengesellschaften. Gustav Fischer, Jena. Oberdorfer, E. 1992. Sueddeutsche Pflanzengesellschaften, Teil IV. Waelder und Gebuesche. Eugen Ulmer, Stuttgart. Ohmann, J.L., & T.A. Spies. 1998. Regional gradient analysis and spatial pattern of woody plant communities of Oregon forests. Ecological Monographs 68: 151-182. Pillar, V.D., & E.E. Sosinski Jr. 2003. An improved method for searching plant functional types by numerical analysis. _Journal of Vegetation Science_ 14: 323-332. BOOK REVIEW: MAP OF NATURAL VEGETATION OF EUROPE From: Hans Roemer [hlroemer@shaw.ca] Bohn U., Neuhausl R., unter Mitarbeit von Gollub G., Hettwer C., Neuhauslova Z., Schlueter H. et Weber H. 2000/2003. Map of the Natural Vegetation of Europe. Scale 1 : 2,500,000. A monumental cooperative project has just been completed with the publication of the Map of the Natural Vegetation of Europe. The printed work comes in three parts: 1) A map volume with 9 map sheets at 1:2,500,000 and one over- view map at 1:10,000,000. 2) A 153 page Legend volume (German and English). 3) The 654 page Explanatory Text volume. The map volume has an additional color-keyed legend sheet which shows aggregated map units, while the legend in book form has further details (i.e. including the letter/number subunits shown on the maps separated by thin lines, but not distinguished by color). Altogether, the mapping contains 698 mapping units and there are some 170 different colors. The Explanatory volume contains another 13 maps on topics including floral and geographical realms, various excerpt maps for specific vegeta- tion complexes, and one CD ROM (see below). The mapping comprises an area including Iceland in the northwest, Novaja Zemlya in the northeast, the Caspian Sea and Caucasus in the southeast, and the Iberian Peninsula in the southwest. The classification underlying the mapping is hierarchical, with vegetation formations the first principle of organization, followed by plant geographical and eventually ecological criteria. Nineteen main formations are described which are subdivided into the ultimate 698 units. The mapping portrays the potential natural vegetation, rather than current modifications and successional stages caused by human management. The Explanatory volume describes mainly the vegetation forma- tions, but also the history of the international initiative, the general principles and underlying classification for the map- ping, and the geological and vegetation history of the map area. Each of the main formations has a thorough treatment of its typological delimitation, geographical distribution, structure and physiognomy, species combination, syntaxonomy, climate, site conditions, landscape context, state of preservation, land uses, successional and disclimax stages, and formal conservation status/designations. Compressed vegetation tables are presented for many of the more well-researched vegetation units. This volume also has 148 excellent color photographs for a selection of well-preserved vegetation units as well as 23 figures and diagrams. An extensive bibliography of regional and country mapping projects, a list of scientific collaborators, synonymy lists and taxonomic comments complete the volume. Besides the specialized excerpt maps, the back pocket also carries the CD ROM. The main contents of the CD ROM are very detailed data sheets for each of the 698 mapping units. Further there is a comprehensive bibliography keyed to the map units, a complete list of the plant species mentioned anywhere in this work's different components, a glossary, and a list of contributors to the mapping. The data sheets have some information in common with the Explanatory volume, but are more specific for the mapping units and considerably more detailed where the source information allowed this. The CD ROM contents forms a data base which is searchable by vegetation units and by the name of any plant species mentioned in the data sheets. For instance, a search for Iris pumila (there are 17 species of Iris listed) leads you to three dif- ferent vegetation units, L7: West Caucasian meadow steppes, L16: Crimean herb-grass steppes, and M16: West and central Pontic desert steppes. The last of these occurs on and near the Crimean Peninsula. Search results for it reveal a species combination of some 20 grasses, subshrubs, herbs and geophytes dominated by _Stipa_, _Festuca_ and _Artemisia_ species. As an example of floristic detail, we learn that _Cladonia rangiformis_, _C. subrangiformis_, _Parmelia ryssola_, _P. vagans_, _Cornicularia steppae_, and _Tortula ruralis_ form a moss/lichen layer. About two pages of additional ecological, structure, synsystematic, geographical, soil, climate and distributional information are available on the M16 data sheet. Searching for a more widespread species, _Festuca_ heterophylla (there are 98 species of _Fes- tuca_ that are searchable!), results in a list of 17 mapping units. The mapping and legend portions of this work are fully func- tional in both German and English. However the explanatory volume is in German only and so is the CD ROM at present. However, a new interactive version of the CD ROM is promised "for 2003" which will also be issued in English and will be redesigned to solicit feedback on those vegetation units that require further work to bring them up to the central European standard of detail. This publication is the product of intensive scientific col- laboration over a twenty-year period involving experts from 31 European countries and the Caucasus states. International col- laboration started in earnest as a result of a colloquium held in 1979 in Bohemia, but attempts to work towards a Europe- wide vegetation map existed even earlier. From 1979 Dr. Robert Neuhausl of Czechoslovakia became the leading proponent and coordinator for this project. After his death in 1991 his wife, Dr. Zdenka Neuhauslova carried on his work in collaboration with the new coordinator, Dr. Udo Bohn of the German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation in Bonn. Much of the map is based on pre-existing vegetation maps of the individual countries and regions involved (a bibliography of these maps is provided in the Explanatory volume). By necessity, these maps were of various degrees of detail and based on a variety of class- ification systems. Coordination, correlation and boundary match- ing of these maps must have been a horrendous task to perform. However, the elegance of the final product certainly belies these obvious difficulties! Congratulations for this achievement are due to the coordinator, the authors, and the scientific collaborators, especially those who worked on this project during the time of political adver- sity before the fall of the iron courtain. Explanatory Text (German) with CD ROM. ISBN 3-7843-3837-2 Eur 38.00 Maps and Legend volumes (German and English)ISBN 3-7843- 3809-7 Eur 16.00 Order from: BfN-Schriftenvertrieb im Landwirtschaftsverlag 48084 Muenster, Germany http://www.1v-h.de/bfn FOOTNOTE TO "MAP OF THE NATURAL VEGETATION OF EUROPE": INTERACTIVE ENGLISH CD VERSION IN THE WORKS The monumental mapping project for the European continent will soon be available in an interactive, bilingual English/German CD-ROM package. A preview of this CD was given at a recent vegetation database workshop near Munich, and it is very impressive. Not only will there be linked, query-able datasheets for the 698 different mapping units, these are in turn linked to an interactive spa- tial display very reminiscent of ArcView. One can zoom into and out of the various regions, click coverages on and off, clip and paste, click on units to be connected with datasheets, photos of vegetation types or chapters of the explanatory text, and sort data within the datasheets according to the user's criteria - and all in this in English, if that is your language of choice. This will be a major research and teaching tool and a sig- nificant contribution towards understanding vegetation patterns and setting conservation priorities at the European level. English-speaking users would be well served to wait for this version, which is promised within the next 2-4 months from the German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN) (http://www.bfn.de). BIOGEOCLIMATIC MAPS FOR BRITISH COLUMBIA From: Del Meidinger [Del.Meidinger@gems2.gov.bc.ca] The Ministry of Forests Research Branch recently posted files of Biogeoclimatic Subzone/Variant maps at a scale of (1:250,000 or 1:300,000) for the entire province. These maps are available in Adobe Acrobat (pdf) format and can be accessed from the follow- ing website: http://www.for.gov.bc.ca/hre/becweb/mapping.htm#getting (go to "Subzone Variant Mapping at a District Scale"). There are 2 series of maps, one with a full base designed for use in the field and one with a shaded relief background designed as a wall map. These maps cover the entire 950,000 kmė of British Columbia. There are 14 biogeoclimatic zones and about 192 mapped subzones or variants (units are mapped to the lowest recognized biogeoclimatic unit). Digital files of biogeoclimatic units for use in GIS modelling are also available at this web site. Field guides that present the classification of ecosystems within a biogeoclimatic unit are available for most subzones/variants. See the links to various guides beginning with "A field guide for site identification and interpretation" at http://www.for.gov.bc.ca/hfd/pubs/Lmh.htm BOOK REVIEW: CIRCUMBOREAL CONIFEROUS FORESTS From: Marcel Rejmanek [mrejmanek@ucdavis.edu] This review will be published in Madrono; permission to post it in BEN was granted by both the author and the journal. Vegetation of circumboreal coniferous forests. Edited by Milan Chytry and Toby Spribille. 2002. OPULUS Press, Uppsala, Sweden. 184 pp. EUR 30.00 ISBN 91-88716-27-9. Order from: http://www.opuluspress.se/ The coniferous forests of Eurasia and North America represent one of the largest vegetation formations in the world, occupying approximately 19 million km2. The centers of biodiversity of these forests are in eastern Asia and western North America. However, despite their vast size and environmental significance, boreal forests have received comparatively little attention from phytosociologists. Their continuous distribution across the northern hemisphere points to the need for international cooperation in comparative studies and prioritization of par- ticular areas for conservation. In order to facilitate such cooperation, a workshop entitled "_Vegetation Classification and Phytogeography of Circumboreal Coniferous Forests_" was held in association with the 44th Symposium of the International As- sociation for Vegetation Science in Freising-Weihenstephan, Germany, in 2001. The volume under review took shape at this workshop. It proves that finding a common platform for an under- standing of the circumboreal coniferous biome is a realistic goal. Representation of relevant geographical areas is reasonably balanced: two chapters on European coniferous forests, two on forests in Asia, and two on forests in British Columbia, the American Northwest, and the Rocky Mountains. Toby Spribille and Alina Stachurska-Swakon wrote chapters on classification of North American coniferous forests. As it has already been ap- parent from his earlier writings (1999, 2000, 2001), Spribille emerges as a leader in American phytosociology. His elaborated descriptions of forest communities (bryophytes and lichens are included) and their classification into floristically defined associations, alliances, and orders match international stand- ards and follow rules of the International Code of Phytosociological Nomenclature (Weber et al. 2000). In the two mentioned chapters, over 700 releves were used for identifica- tion of 35 associations of which 13 were described for the first time. Also, one new alliance and one new order were validly published here. We should appreciate validation of several old names in these chapters. This is a commendable habit that helps to maintain links to earlier studies and prevents accumulation of unnecessary synonyms. The only critical comment that I can make is probably not com- pletely fair at this stage of development of phytosociology in North America (and, for the same reason in Asia), but it still should be spelled out: more attention should be paid to soil and climate characterization of individual syntaxa. So far, qualita- tive statements about soil moisture, longitudinal and al- titudinal range, slope, and cover in individual strata is usually all what is provided. In Europe, phytosociology has been walking hand in hand with soil science since the very beginning when Josias Braun-Blanquet started working with Hans Jenny in the Alps in the early 1920's. Currently, an unresolved issue is whether boreal coniferous forests in North American belong to the class (the highest vegetation classification unit) _Vaccinio-Piceetea_, originally described by Braun-Blanquet and his colleagues from the Alps. Many circumboreal elements of these forests (_Galium boreale_, _Linnaea borealis_, _Listera cordata_, _Lycopodium_ spp., _Moneses uniflora_, _Orthilia secunda_, _Pleurozium schreberi_, _Rhytidiadelphus loreus_, _Vaccinium uliginosum_, etc.) provide the justification for one circumboreal class. However, the paucity of traditional _Vaccinio-Piceetea_ species in the forests of the alliance _Tsugion mertensianae_, known from subalpine habitats in Oregon, Idaho and British Columbia, makes this question more complicated. Chapter by Milan Chytry (Czech Republic) and his colleagues from Austria and Slovakia deals with the Central European _Picea abies_ forests. This chapter deserves a special attention. It addresses a nagging question of inconsistent approaches to the designation of diagnostic species. Using 20,164 releves from the Central European forests, they concluded that lists of diagnos- tic species published in phytosociological literature are heavily context-dependent. Some of these lists are useful for identification of vegetation units at a local scale, while others for distinguishing units within a narrowly delimited community type over a large area. Therefore, the application of published lists of diagnostic species outside of the context (the underlying data sets and range of comparisons) should be done only with an explicit understanding of this context. Two recent attempts to classify vegetation in the western USA have been, for many different reasons, unsatisfactory; for critical evaluations see Keil (1997), Rejmanek (1997), Spribille and Ceska (2002), and Zedler (1997). As a contrast, North American studies in this volume, as well as studies by Manuel Peinado and his colleagues (1997, 1998), represent a definitive starting points of, and models for, professional vegetation classification in this part of the world. Because now, after a long period of neglect, the need for vegetation classification is clearly recognized in the U.S. (http://www.esa.org/vegweb/NVC_guidelines_v3.pdf), this volume should be available, at least, in all professional libraries. References Keil, D. J. 1997. A Manual of California Vegetation [review]. _Systematic Botany_ 22: 410-411. Peinado, M., J.L. Aguirre, & J. Delgadillo. 1997. Phytosociological, bioclimatic and biogeographical class- ification of woody climax communities of western North America. _Journal of Vegetation Science_ 8: 505-528. Peinado, M., J.L. Aguirre, & M. de la Cruz. 1998. A phytosociological survey of the boreal forests (_Vaccinio- Piceetea) in North America_. Plant Ecology 137: 151-202. Rejmanek, M. 1997. Vegetation classification: shortcuts lead nowhere. _Global Ecology and Biogeography Letters_ 6: 164- 165. Spribille, T. 1999. Forest vegetation in the northern Salish Mountains of northwestern Montana (U.S.A.). _Phytoc- coenologia_ 29: 503-577. Spribille, T. 2000. Clarification regarding the paper "Forest vegetation in the northern Salish Mountains of northwestern Montana (U.S.A.)". _Phytocoenologia_ 30: 143-144. Spribille, T. and A. Ceska. 2002. North American Boreal and Western Temperate Forest Vegetation [review]. _Journal of Vegetation Science_ 13: 749-750. See also: http://www.ou.edu/cas/botany-micro/ben/ben276.html Spribille, T., H.G. Stroh, & F.J. Triepke. 2001. Are habitat types compatible with floristically defined associations? _Journal of Vegetation Science_ 12: 791-796. Weber, H.E., J. Moravec, & J.-P. Theurillat, 2000. International code of phytosociological nomenclature. 3rd ed. _Journal of Vegetation Science_ 11: 739-768. Zedler, P. H. 1997. A Manual of California Vegetation [review]. _Madrono_ 44: 214-219 MOUNTAIN FORESTS OF NORTHWESTERN NORTH AMERICA From: Spribille, Toby. 2002. The mountain forests of British Columbia and the American Northwest: Floristic patterns and syntaxonomy. _Folia Geobotanica_ 37: 475-508. Introduction, and syntaxonomical units. [Permission to post this in BEN granted by both the author and the _Folia Geobotanica_.] The forests of northwestern North America have been extensively inventoried and classified. The systems of classification used in this region, however, are not always well understood in other parts of the world. Primarily two approaches to forest class- ification have been employed. In the United States, habitat typology, a forest site classification system based on concepts of succession and climax (Pfister & Arno 1980), has enjoyed widespread acceptance. In western Canada, a three-tiered ap- proach to site and vegetation inventory known as biogeoclimatic ecosystem classification (Krajina 1969, Pojar et al. 1987) is used. These systems were set up largely to facilitate regional ecosystem mapping and silvicultural management of forested lands. In both cases, the systems have proven well-suited to their stated goals. However, they are for various reasons not directly compatible with syntaxonomic systems used elsewhere (Spribille et al. 2001). This has carried with it the disad- vantage of making most research tied to these ecosystems less accessible to vegetation science as a whole. Notwithstanding this drawback, vegetation inventory efforts in northwestern North America have provided an abundance of data on the floristic composition of the forests. High quality phytosociological releves have been gathered in the thousands for the preparation of forest habitat type classifications in the western United States (Wellner 1989). In British Columbia, similar numbers of releves have been sampled for the construc- tion of forest site identification manuals by the provincial Ministry of Forests (Meidinger & Pojar 1991). Graduate and doctoral theses and dissertations completed on various vegeta- tion types over the past 50 years provide yet another sig- nificant source of phytosociological data. Many of these are, however, unpublished and little known. Several syntaxonomic and physiognomic overviews of the forest vegetation of parts or all of northwestern North America have been presented (e.g., Ilvessalo 1929, Kujala 1945, Knapp 1957, Hamet-Ahti 1965, Krajina 1969, Franklin & Dyrness 1973, Pfister et al. 1977, Meidinger & Pojar 1991, Klinka et al. 1996, Peinado et al. 1997, 1998, Rivas-Mart­nez et al. 1999a,b). These works have provided valuable synopses of the composition, climate, ecology and geographic extent of the forest communities of the region. However, they have only rarely built on each other. This is especially true of syntaxonomic proposals. If one includes the lowland _Pseudotsuga menziesii_ forests not treated here, this practice has resulted in the description of no fewer than 5 classes, 20 orders, 56 alliances and over 110 associations from forests in the region. It is important to note that this tally does not include the numerous site associations described within the framework of biogeoclimatic ecosystem classification in British Columbia, nor the many habitat types and associations described by forest workers in the American Pacific Northwest. Clearly, the region has experienced a veritable explosion. in the number of described syntaxa, not unlike that seen in Europe four decades ago (Pignatti 1968). In northwestern North America, however, the syntaxa are described in three different syn- taxonomic languages. Notwithstanding the differing names applied to these com- munities, existing overviews of the forest vegetation of northwestern North America almost invariably recognize the existence of the same major forest formations. In general terms, eight of these can be recognized. In order from oceanic to continental, these include 1. coastal temperate rainforests dominated by _Picea sitchen- sis_ and _Tsuga heterophylla_, 2. coastal temperate forests dominated by _Pseudotsuga menziesii_, _Thuja plicata_, _Tsuga heterophylla_ or _Alnus rubra_, 3. coastal montane to subalpine forests dominated by _Tsuga mertensiana_, _Abies amabilis_ and _Chamaecyparis nootkatensis_, 4. inland moist temperate forests dominated by _Thuja plicata_ and _Tsuga heterophylla_, 5. inland montane to subalpine forests dominated by _Abies lasiocarpa_ and _Picea engelmannii_, 6. southern boreal forests of _Pinus contorta_, _Abies lasiocarpa_ and _Picea glauca_ in the transition zone to the boreal biome, 7. dry inland forests, dominated by _Pseudotsuga menziesii_ var. _glauca_ or _Larix occidentalis_, and finally 8. _Pinus ponderosa_ steppe forests. The major differences between the existing classification schemes lie in how the individual formations are delimited, in how they are considered to relate to each other and to other forest formations elsewhere in the world, and lastly, in how they are named. Creating a platform for scientific exchange across international boundaries is one of the overarching objec- tives of phytosociological syntaxonomy. This paper is the first installment of a syntaxonomic revision of the coniferous forests of northwestern North America. Here, the main objective will be to examine communities most closely related to the circumboreal coniferous forests. These include the coastal and inland montane and subalpine forests summarized in (3) to (6) above. These forests have in common not only similarities in floristic com- position, but also occurrence at middle to upper elevations, cool, short summers and moderate to high annual precipitation. _Tsugion mertensianae_ _Rubo-Tsugetum mertensianae_ _Vaccinio-Tsugetum mertensianae_ _Cladothamno-Tsugetum mertensianae_ _Abieti amabilis-Tsugetum mertensianae_ _Rhododendro-Abietetum lasiocarpae_ _Abieti lasiocarpae-Tsugetum mertensianae_ _Angelico-Abietetum bifoliae_ _Luzulo-Abietetum bifoliae_ _Menziesio-Abietetum bifoliae_ _Xerophyllo-Pinetum albicaulis_ _Abieti-Tsugion heterophyllae_ _Arnico-Abietetum bifoliae_ _Ledo-Piceetum engelmannii_ _Xerophyllo-Abietetum bifoliae_ _Thuja plicata-Tsuga heterophylla_ forest _Pino latifoliae-Piceetum marianae_ _Vaccinio-Piceetum albertianae_ _Pleurozio-Tsugetum heterophyllae_ _Gymnocarpio-Abietion_ _Piceo-Tsugetum heterophyllae_ _Gymnocarpio disjuncti-Thujetum plicatae_ _Streptopo streptopoidis-Tsugetum heterophyllae_ _Gymnocarpio-Abietetum lasiocarpae_ _Rubo-Piceetum sitchensis_ _ Tsugo mertensianae-Piceetum sitchensis_ _Oplopanaco-Thujetum plicatae_ _Lysichito-Chamaecyparidion nootkatensis_ _Lysichito-Chamaecyparidetum nootkatensis_ References Franklin, J.F.. & C.T. Dyrness. 1973. _Natural vegetation of Oregon and Washington. Revised edition_. Oregon State Univer- sity Press, Corvallis. Hamet-Ahti, L. 1965. Notes on the vegetation zones of western Canada, with special reference to the forests of Wells-Gray Park, British Columbia. _Ann. Bot. Fenn._ 2: 274- 299 Ilvessalo, Y. 1929. Notes on some forest (site) types in North America. _Acta Forest. Fenn._ 34: 1-93. Klinka, K., H. Qian, J. Pojar, & D.V. Meidinger. 1996. Class- ification of natural forest communities of coastal British Columbia, Canada. _Vegetatio_ 125: 149-168. Knapp, R. 1957. Ueber die Gliederung der Vegetation von Nor- damerika. Hoehere Vegetationseinheiten. _Geobot. Mitt._ 4: 1- 63. Krajina, V. 1969. Ecology of forest trees in British Columbia. _Ecol. W. N. Amer._ 2/1: 1.146. Kujala, V. 1945. Waldvegetationsuntersuchungen in Kanada, mit besonderer Beruecksichtigung der Anbaumoeglichkeiten kanadis- cher Holzarten auf natuerlichen Waldboeden in Finnland. _Ann. Acad. Sci. Fenn. Ser. AIV Biol._ 7: 1-434. Meidinger, D.V. & J. Pojar (eds). 1991. _Ecosystems of British Columbia_. British Columbia Ministry of Forests Research Branch, Victoria. Peinado, M., J.L. Aguirre, & J. Delgadillo. 1997. Phytosociological, bioclimatic and biogeographical class- ification of woody climax communities of western North America. _J. Veg. Sci._ 8: 505-528. Peinado, M., J.L. Aguirre, & M. de la Cruz. 1998. A phytosociological survey of the boreal forest (_Vaccinio- Piceetea_) in North America. _Pl. Ecol._ 137: 151-202. Pfister, R.D. & S.F. Arno. 1980. Classifying forest habitat types based on potential climax vegetation. _Forest Sci._ 26: 52-70. Pfister, R.D.. B.L. Kovalchik, S.F. Arno, & R.C. Presby. 1977. _Forest habitat types of Montana_. USDA Forest Service, Intermountain Forest Range Experiment Station Gen. Techn. Rep. INT-34, Ogden. Pignatti, S. 1968. Die Inflation der hoeheren pflanzensoziologischen Einheiten. Pp. 85-88 in: Tuexen, R. (ed.), _Pflanzensoziologische Systematik, Bericht ueber das internationale Symposium in Stolzenau/Weser 1964_, Junk, Den Haag. Pojar, J., K. Klinka,.& D.V. Meidinger. 1987. Biogeoclimatic ecosystem classification in British Columbia. _Forest Ecol. Managem._ 22: 119-154. Rivas-Martinez, S., D. Sanchez-Mata, & M. Costa. 1999a. North American boreal and western temperate forest vegetation. (Syntaxonomical synopsis of the potential natural plant communities of North America, II). _Itinera Geobot_. 12: 5- 316. Rivas-Martinez S., D. Sanchez-Mata, & M. Costa. 1999b. North American new phytosociological classes. _Itinera Geobot_. 13: 349-352. Spribille, T., H.G. Stroh, & F.J. Triepke. 2001. Are habitat types compatible with floristically defined associations? _J. Veg. Sci._ 12: 791-796. Wellner, C.A. 1989. Classification of habitat types in the western United States. Pp. 7-21 in: Ferguson, D.E., P. Mor- gan, & F.D. Johnson (eds.), _Proceedings: Land class- ifications based on vegetation: applications for resource management, Moscow, ID, Nov. 17-19, 1987_, USDA Forest Serv- ice, Intermountain Research Station Gen. Techn. Report INT- 257, Ogden. ________________________________________________________________ Subscriptions: http://victoria.tc.ca/mailman/listinfo/ben-l Send submissions to aceska@victoria.tc.ca BEN is archived at http://www.ou.edu/cas/botany-micro/ben/ ________________________________________________________________ From aceska@victoria.tc.ca Thu Apr 15 16:15:43 2004 From: aceska@victoria.tc.ca (Adolf Ceska) Date: Thu, 15 Apr 2004 08:15:43 -0700 Subject: [BEN-L]BEN # 327 Message-ID: <000401c422fc$87b733d0$744606cf@HPLAPTOP001> BBBBB EEEEEE NN N ISSN 1188-603X BB B EE NNN N BBBBB EEEEE NN N N BOTANICAL BB B EE NN NN ELECTRONIC BBBBB EEEEEE NN N NEWS No. 327 April 15, 2004 aceska@victoria.tc.ca Victoria, B.C. ----------------------------------------------------------- Dr. A. Ceska, P.O.Box 8546, Victoria, B.C. Canada V8W 3S2 ----------------------------------------------------------- GERALD ELKINGTON (1899-2004) AND HIS LEGACY From: Tim Ennis, Director of Land Stewardship, British Columbia Region, Nature Conservancy of Canada [time@telus.net] Garry Oak (_Quercus garryana_) ecosystems and their associated ecosystems are one of the most endangered ecosystems in western North America. Their range extends from approximately Campbell River, British Columbia on Vancouver Island's eastern shores in a southward fashion along the sub-Mediterranean rain-shadow habitats of south- eastern Vancouver Island and the adjacent Gulf Islands through the San Juan Islands and Puget Sound and down through the Willamette Valley in Oregon approximately as far south as Eugene. From here the Garry oaks mix with other oak species, (e.g. Kellogg's oak, _Quercus kelloggii_) and extend well into California as the northern half of a chain of oak habitats extending through Central America. Widespread habitat loss and fragmentation, invasive species and the effects of fire suppression have largely been responsible for all known plant associates of Garry oak being listed as "critically imperiled". Throughout the Georgia Basin-Puget Trough-Willamette Valley Ecoregion, Garry oak ecosystems have been restricted to approximately 2% of their 1850's distribu- tion. In Canada over 117 species at risk are associated with these Pacific oak habitats. The conservation challenge facing Garry oak ecosystems is extreme, as 75% of the populations of BC, Washington and Oregon live in this ecoregion, which is over 80% privately owned, and 40% either urbanized or tilled. The remaining 60% of the ecoregion is largely being subjected to industrial forestry, with less than 3% of the area protected in parks. The valley-bottom, deep soil Garry oak savannah ecosystem types are particularly endangered, literally balancing on the edge of extinction. These areas in particular were immediately valued by early European settlers to the region, who were looking for arable land for livestock, and agricultural land that required less effort to clear than coastal forests. During the period between 1850 and the 1890's, the majority of this deep-soil habitat was converted to agricultural uses and seeded with European pasture grasses (see _Conservation Biology_, April 2004 for a literature review of pre-contact Garry oak plant associations). In the Cowichan Valley, one such pioneering family, the Elkingtons, purchased and farmed over 600 acres of oak savannah for the production of butter, cream and other dairy products. The Elkingtons were also ship builders and mariners, and are credited as being the first people to export these products to the newly established Fort Victoria from the Maple Bay area. However typical their settlement pattern may have been, one thing was unique about the Elkingtons relative to their contem- poraries; the Elkingtons kept one portion of their land in its natural condition, which they referred to as Oak Park. In the centre of this area they built a second home, having lost their first one in an accidental fire reportedly started when a Chinese farm worker knocked over his oil lamp. This second home was built in 1894/95 and on January 7, 1899 a son Gerald was born in the master bedroom upstairs. Gerald enjoyed a very happy childhood at Oak Park, and grew to appreciate the natural world. He once won a school contest for collecting the largest number of wildflower specimens which he pressed and kept in a book. He also learned a great deal about the birds, and other animals which inhabited Oak Park and the surrounding lands and waters near Mt. Tzuhalem, Maple Mountain and the Maple Bay area. In his late teens, Gerald moved away to attend McGill Univer- sity, interrupted by a time in the forces during WWI. Upon returning, he completed his training as an electrical engineer, and worked for General Electric for some time in the U.S., before moving to Fernie in south-eastern British Columbia, and taking up a position with a power corporation in the Kootenays. Here he raised his family (sons Peter, Bill and Dick and daughter Awdrie) with his wife Peggy, enjoying a lifestyle of fishing, hunting and boating in the lakes and rivers of the Canadian Rockies. After his parents passed away, Oak Park was rented out for a short time, until one day Gerald returned to visit, and found his family's house rundown and in bad repair. He immediately evicted the renters and boarded up the house. It sat this way for some time, until he and Peggy moved back into the house at Oak Park from Fernie in 1966. Gerald again demonstrated his caring nature for the land, by maintaining Oak Park in it's natural condition, removing the invasive Scotch broom as he was able and allowing the native flora to flourish largely undisturbed. Many years passed. Peggy sadly passed away at the age of 94, but Gerald was able to carry on. In 1999 Gerald celebrated his 100th birthday. By this time, he had a staff of caretakers looking after him so that he was able to remain living at Oak Park. No doubt these costs were escalating, and the Elkington family decided they had to sell Oak Park. Gerald's sons were interested in seeing the property subdivided and developed to maximize their return, which must have been a heartbreaking situation for Gerald, who wanted nothing more than for one of his children to carry on the family legacy and continue living in the house. Clearly this was not going to happen, and the property went on the market. A local developer became very interested in the property and made plans for a subdivision. Lots were surveyed, and flagging tape went up all over Oak Park. Fortunately, local Maple Bay residents had come to love Oak Park, and its mag- nificent displays of native wildflowers each spring. One concerned resident, Barb Stone, contacted the Cowichan Community Land Trust (CCLT) and launched a campaign to save this last vestige of deep-soil oak habitat. Given that the value of the land had increased significantly from the $600 ($1/acre)which the Elkington's paid for it in the 1800's, the CCLT contacted the Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC) to help secure the property. The local fund raising effort was hugely successful, raising approximately $150,000, but in total over $850,000 was needed to protect Oak Park. Fortunately, NCC was successful in raising the requisite funds from Federal and Provincial governments, private donors and corporations like Shell Canada, and in 1999 Oak Park was purchased by NCC for the purposes of biodiversity conservation. Through the decades, the Elkington's had sold most of their original 600 acres, and by 1999 only Oak Park remained. It was 30 acres of Canada's most intact deep-soil Garry oak habitat. Botanists in the Conservation Data Centre (CDC) identified significant populations of the rare _Aster curtus_, _Viola praemorsa_ and _Triteleia howellii_, in addition to extensive swards of more common Garry oak elements such as _Camassia leichtlinii_, _Camassia quamash_, _Lomatium utriculatum_, _Dodecatheon hendersonii_, _Erythronium oregonum_, _Collinsia grandiflora_ var. _pusilla_, _Carex inops_, _Festuca roemeri_, and many other species of native plants and animals. In fact, the CDC botanists noted that despite a legacy of fire suppres- sion and invasive species introduction to the region, Oak Park expressed an unprecedented 60% native cover. Despite having purchased the entire property from Gerald, in- cluding the house, NCC agreed to donate a life tenancy lease agreement to Gerald, that he might live out the rest of his days in the home he was born in. Regretfully we must report that after nearly 5 years of enjoying Gerald's company, he passed away in the house at Oak Park, on Feb. 7, 2004, at 105 years. Gerald was fond of recalling the sound of horse and buggy along Maple Bay Road, the sight of Purple Martins and Western bluebirds swooping through the oaks, and commenting on how slowly the oaks grow. Somewhat fittingly, Gerald's urn was interred at St. Peter's Anglican Church just down the street, alongside his wife, and parents, in a graveyard that itself dominated by Garry oaks, and has similarly avoided the plough. In this new place Gerald will always be surrounded by the wildflowers he loved and cared for so much. The Nature Conservancy of Canada will miss having Gerald around, and will continue protect, steward and restore Oak Park (now known as the Cowichan Garry Oak Preserve) in his honour. We are all indebted to him for his careful stewardship of this rare ecological jewel. WORKSHOP ANNOUNCEMENT: IDENTIFYING EPIPHYTIC CRUSTOSE LICHENS From: Toby Spribille [tspribi@gwdg.de] When: July 23, 24 and 25, 2004 Where: Priest River Experimental Forest near Priest Lake, Idaho "Identifying the real tree huggers: epiphytic crustose lichens", will be the topic of a three-day workshop to be held by Toby Spribille on July 23, 24 and 25, 2004 at the Priest River Ex- perimental Forest near Priest Lake, Idaho. The workshop is being sponsored by the Kinnikinnick Chapter of the Idaho Native Plant Society. The emphasis of the course will be the recognition of important and common crust genera on trees and snags, but par- ticipants will also have a look at crusts on rock and soil. The program includes: 1. introduction into morphology; what you need to know to identify lichen crusts 2. introduction into ecology; how to conduct surveys for crus- tose lichens without a microscope in the field 3. what's special in our part of the world: endemic crusts, new species and other exciting tidbits 4. why look at crusts? Their ecological relevance and indicator value. Workshop participants will obtain a script that will contain NEW keys to inland epiphytic crustose lichens. The program includes short field trips Friday and Saturday and one all- day field excursion Sunday, probably to the edge of the Salmo-Priest Wilderness. Participants should bring field- going gear and paper collecting baggies, as well as a hand lens, and if at all possible also a light microscope. However, people who do not have a light microscope can also participate. Prior experience with macrolichens might be helpful but is not a prerequisite to participation. Participation will be limited to 15 people. Registration will be $107 per person; this will include 3 nights lodging at the station. A reduced rate of $77 will be possible for people who arrange other accommodations. Registration will proceed on a first-come, first-served basis. To register please send an e-mail to Toby at tspribi@gwdg.de and include your name, mailing and e-mail address and whether or not you can bring a light microscope. Registration deadline is June 1, 2004. OREGON: TWO NEW PUBLICATIONS ON WETLANDS From: Jimmy Kagan, Director, Oregon Natural Heritage Information Center, 1322 SE Morrison St., Portland, OR 97214 phone: 503- 731-3070 ext. 111 [jimmy.kagan@orst.edu] We have just finished up two projects that have been a long time coming. The books are available online, and some hard copies are available for those who need them. The URL for the books are: Riparian and Wetland Vegetation of Central and Eastern Oregon (http://oregonstate.edu/ornhic/crowe2004.pdf) The eastern Oregon guide has photographs, valley cross-section illustrations, and is 483 pages long (without the stand tables). The PDF file has color images and maps (all in the introduction) that we have been forced to print in black and white. If anyone wants the stand tables, they add another 300 pages, but let us know. Native Wetland Plant Associations of Northwestern Oregon (http://oregonstate.edu/ornhic/christy2004.pdf) The northwestern Oregon guide has text and tables, and is 250 pages long. Contact theresa.koloszar@oregonstate.edu if you would like a copy. ________________________________________________________________ Subscriptions: http://victoria.tc.ca/mailman/listinfo/ben-l Send submissions to aceska@victoria.tc.ca BEN is archived at http://www.ou.edu/cas/botany-micro/ben/ ________________________________________________________________ From aceska@victoria.tc.ca Fri Apr 30 21:15:39 2004 From: aceska@victoria.tc.ca (Adolf Ceska) Date: Fri, 30 Apr 2004 13:15:39 -0700 Subject: [BEN-L]BEN # 328 Message-ID: <001d01c42eef$ec2cd8c0$744606cf@HPLAPTOP001> BBBBB EEEEEE NN N ISSN 1188-603X BB B EE NNN N BBBBB EEEEE NN N N BOTANICAL BB B EE NN NN ELECTRONIC BBBBB EEEEEE NN N NEWS No. 328 April 30, 2004 aceska@victoria.tc.ca Victoria, B.C. ----------------------------------------------------------- Dr. A. Ceska, P.O.Box 8546, Victoria, B.C. Canada V8W 3S2 ----------------------------------------------------------- CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT: SECOND INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON CIRCUMPOLAR VEGETATION CLASSIFICATION AND MAPPING Troms, Norway, 2-6 June 2004 Web site: http://www.geobotany.uaf.edu/cavm_workshop_2004.html E-mail contact: Christine Martin [fncrm@uaf.edu] SCOPE: The conference will focus on issues related to class- ification, mapping, and modeling of vegetation in Arctic tundra regions. The last major gathering of Arctic vegetation scien- tists was at the International Conference on Classification of Arctic Vegetation, held at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, Boulder CO, USA, 5-9 March 1992. Since then there has been considerable progress toward classification and mapping as a means of understanding the Arctic as a single geo-ecosystem, and to aid in numerous efforts to model the response of vegeta- tion to climate and land-use changes. The classification portion of the conference will be primarily devoted to vegetation surveys of syntaxa or monographs on spe- cial areas or regions of the Arctic. Floristic and taxonomic papers might be accepted if they are directly of importance to vegetation science. The mapping portion will focus on circumpolar and large- regional scale mapping efforts. Papers directed at circumpolar issues are particularly welcome. Members of the Circumpolar Arctic Vegetation Mapping (CAVM) project are encouraged to present regional maps derived from the CAVM at 1:4M scale with legends that show the dominant plant associations or plant community types. MARINE AND TERRESTRIAL ECOSYSTEM LINKAGES: THE MAJOR ROLE OF SALMON AND BEARS TO RIPARIAN COMMUNITIES From: T. E. Reimchen, Department of Biology, University of Victoria, Victoria, B.C. [reimchen@uvic.ca] Introduction Throughout the Pacific Rim, the yearly migration of anadromous salmon provides a pulse of nutrients for a diverse range of marine, freshwater and terrestrial organisms. Jeff Cederholm from the Washington compiled literature on marine food web interactions and noted that at least 130 species of vertebrates use migrating salmon as a food source (Cederholm et al. 2002). John Stockner, Ken Ashley and colleagues from Vancouver and Mark Wipfli and colleagues from Alaska have shown major increases in primary and secondary productivity in stream habitats from the contribution of salmon carcasses to the stream channels (Wipfli et al. 1998; review in Stockner and Ashley 2003). At river mouths from California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia and Alaska, black bears and brown bears congregate during autumn migration and forage on salmon, acquiring some 70% of their annual protein consumption during this short period (Reimchen 1992, 1994, 2000; Gilbert and Lanner 1995; Hilderbrand et al. 1999). Coastal wolves shift from their major diet of deer in summer to that of salmon during the spawning migration (Darimont and Reimchen 2002). Numerous birds including eagles, gulls, ravens and crows also exploit the salmon nutrients. This seasonal pulse of marine nutrients is spatially and temporally associated with a major increase in diversity and abundance of animals throughout the west coast of North America. These investigations parallel several other research programs by colleagues at UBC and at US institutions including those in Alaska and Washington but our lab has focused on identifying the contributions of salmon nutrients to the multiple trophic levels within terrestrial habitats. During an investigation of black bear feeding activity in the autumns of 1992, 1993 and 1994 on the south end of Haida Gwaii, I observed individual bears carry- ing salmon from the stream into the forest where feeding could occur without interference from other bears. Over the eight-week spawning period, each bear transferred up to 700 salmon into the forest leaving remnants of each carcass on the forest floor (Reimchen 1994, 1998, 2000). Most of this foraging occurred during darkness, and by the end of the spawning period, over 5000kg of carcass remnants had accumulated in a 50 m band over the kilometer of stream where spawning occurred. These abandoned tissues were used by a wide diversity of scavengers including gulls, eagles, ravens, crows and marten as well as by large quantities of invertebrates of which fly maggots were the most abundant. While collecting this information on carcasses in old growth forest adjacent to the salmon stream, I suspected that the prevalence of decomposing carcasses as well as the waste products from bears and other scavengers would provide a nutrient source for vegetation. These early observations became the focus for a greatly expanded research program in my lab funded primarily by the David Suzuki Foundation and the Friends of Ecological Reserves which now entails studies from 120 water- sheds extending from Clayoquot Sound on Vancouver Island to the coastal mainland near the Broughton Archipelago north to the grizzly bear sanctuary at the Khutzeymateen River on the north- ern end of the province and across to Haida Gwaii. Throughout the BC coast, black bears and brown bears transfer carcasses into the forest, occasionally to distances of 150 m away from the stream, particularly on steep gradient slopes. We are quan- tifying the contribution of salmon nutrients at multiple levels of the terrestrial ecosystem including bryophytes, herbs, shrubs and conifers, soil and canopy invertebrates including insects, and to vertebrates such as songbirds, black bear, grizzly bear and wolves (general description of this research, graduate projects and pdf files of publications are available at http://web.uvic.ca//) The major natural historical observation to emerge from our studies throughout the coast, and one that is familiar to all coastal First Nations, is that the diversity of predators and scavengers that congregate in estuaries and rivers during spawn- ing migration is directly related to the density of salmon in the river. On the British Columbia mid-coast, highly productive rivers have salmon spawning density as high as 50,000 per kilometer of river and associated with these salmon are con- gregations of up to 10 wolves, 15 bears, 50 bald eagles, 100's of crows and ravens, up to 4000 gulls and numerous song birds. For each of these taxa, it is largely the spawned-out salmon carcasses that provide the major food source over a two-month period. Blowflies are the major consumers of the carcass rem- nants. Usually within three to four days after abandonment by the bears, the carcasses are a mass of maggots. The entire soft tissues will be consumed within a week after which the maggots disperse onto the surrounding substrate and bury into the sur- face mosses. Maggot densities in the moss substrate commonly reach 100 /m2. One of my graduate students, Morgan Hocking, has found that the majority of adult blow flies collected in riparian forests in spring and summer have major isotopic en- richment in 15N and 13C signatures, confirming their trophic origin from salmon carcasses the previous autumn. Hocking has also sampled other invertebrate taxa including earthworms, beetles and spiders from multiple trophic levels from habitats above and below waterfalls and observed major enrichment of 15N below the falls compared with above the falls. The extent of 15N enrichment was greatest at higher trophic levels. This was not due to direct consumption of salmon carcasses but rather due to indirect consumption from salmon-derived nitrogen subsidies to litter, soil and vegetation N pools. (Hocking and Reimchen 2002) The total nitrogen in the invertebrates could be partitioned to source and these results showed that 18-78% of nitrogen was originally derived from salmon, with specific levels depending on species and watershed. Total biomass of insects is up to an order of magnitude higher in forests adjacent to salmon spawning areas relative to riparian forests without access to salmon. Another graduate student, Katie Christie, has now shown that songbirds are more abundant in forests adjacent to salmon spawn- ing areas and have major enrichment in 15N isotopic signatures during the late summer derived from consumption of blowflies as well as higher trophic levels invertebrate predators such as spiders. Research by other members of our lab including Chris Darimont who is investigating coastal wolves has demonstrated that samples of hair yield very clear evidence for a seasonal shift in diet from terrestrial prey to salmon (Darimont and Reimchen 2002). Another lab member, Dan Klinka, is investigating the salmon foraging activity of Kermode bear as a comparison with earlier work on brown bear (Klinka and Reimchen 2000). One of the surprising results from our studies is the extent of salmon nutrient uptake by riparian vegetation. Mosses and liver- worts comprise the dominant ground cover throughout temperate rainforest ecosystems in the North Pacific Rim and these are essential to numerous edaphic processes including temperature regulation and moisture retention. Bryophytes commonly absorb nutrients from precipitation and canopy through fall as well as from underlying soils and N-fixers. Our lab, in particular Chad Wilkinson, has investigated the contribution of salmon- derived nitrogen to eight species of mosses and liverworts (_Rhytidiadelphus loreus_, _Hylocomium splendens_, _Sphagnum girgensohnii_, _S. squarrosum_, _Rhizomnium glabrescens_, _Kindbergia oregana_, _Conicephalum conicum_ and _Pellia neesiana_) above and below waterfalls that are barriers to salmon migration and at a control river without salmon. Overall, Delta 15N signatures ranged from 2% to 7% higher below the falls near the salmon stream than above the falls or at the adjacent control watershed that had no salmon. Delta 15N values were highest in mosses from sites where salmon bone fragments were present in the substrate, indicative of a carcass transfer during previous years. Isotopic values were also high in mosses adjacent to wildlife trails. We also examined percent nitrogen in the moss tissues as nitrogen is generally considered to be a proxy for photosynthetic rate and is the principal limiting nutrient in temperate forest ecosystems. We observed increased levels of tissue nitrogen below the falls and in sites where salmon carcasses were prevalent indicating microspatial heterogeneity in the salmon nutrient pools of these forests. Moss species richness and prevalence of nitrogen-rich soil indicators were also highest in forests adjacent to the salmon stream (Wilkinson et al. submitted). We have examined the contribution of salmon nutrients to other riparian vegetation including _Blechnum spicant_, _Menziesii ferruginea_, _Oplopanax horridus_, _Rubus spectabilis_, _Vac- cinium alaskense_, _V. parvifolium_ and _Tsuga heterophylla_. 15N values were enriched by 1.4% to 9.0% below the falls depend- ing on species and watershed, indicating that 10% to 60% of tissue nitrogen was marine-derived (MDN). As well, %N in foliar tissues was slightly higher below the falls, with the majority of variance occurring between vegetation species. Of interest is that salmonberry, one of the common riparian shrubs, had the highest percent tissue nitrogen of the six most common riparian species (Mathewson et al. 2003; Reimchen et al. 2003). Community structure also differed with higher incidence of nitrogen-rich soil indicator species below the waterfalls. We have also been able to identify historical signatures of salmon-nutrient loading to the riparian zone through analyses of yearly growth rings taken from cores of ancient trees. This has been approached in two methods 1) a direct measurement of yearly growth rate and 2) analyses of 15N signatures and percent N levels in individual rings. These ongoing studies yield clear evidence for increased average growth of conifers with access to salmon. We tested whether there was a yearly growth signature that correlated with yearly differences in actual salmon counts made by Department of Fisheries over the last 50 years. Some trees show very strong correlations between yearly salmon abun- dance and tree growth when lagged from 1 to 3 years but most trees nearby show only weak or no such relationships. The same trend occurs with analyses of 15N signatures in the tree rings. Some trees have high lagged correlation between salmon abundance over the last 50 years and 15N levels in the rings yet adjacent trees show no associations. We are currently trying to identify the best habitat predictors for these trees that show excellent tracking between salmon abundance and nitrogen signatures. Currently, I have obtained 1150 cores of ancient trees in 120 watersheds throughout coastal British Columbia and these cores have the potential of yielding a 300-year history of salmon abundance and riparian nutrient loading on our coast. These investigations are still in their infancy but the emerging data provide a reasonably clear picture of a multi- trophic level linkage between marine and terrestrial ecosystems. When up to 70% of the nitrogen in mosses, herbs, shrubs, ancient trees, canopy insects, songbirds and bears in coastal forests is derived from the central Pacific ocean via the life history of the salmon, the implications of spatial and temporal differences in salmon abundance are substantive. Since 1880, salmon have declined by approximately 80-90% on the west coast of North America due to the combination of over-fishing, large scale commercial logging, dam construction as well as fluctuations in oceanic productivity. What effects if any have there been of this decline and would they be detectable if they did occur? Our studies and those from other labs have found lower levels of estuarine, stream and riparian community diversity in watersheds without access to salmon and these differences are also evident within rivers above waterfalls that are barriers to salmon movement. We have observed that above waterfalls, there are lower species diversity of mosses, lower incidence of nitrogen- rich plant indicator species, lower biomass of insects, lower densities of songbirds and lower growth rate of conifers. This suggests that the estimated 80-90% reduction in salmon abundance throughout the coast will lead to a reduction in carrying capacity and shifts in the plant and animal community structure that converges to that resembling watersheds without access to salmon. References Cederholm, C. J., D. H. Johnson, R. E. Bilby, L. G. Dominguez, A. M. Garrett, W. H. Graeber, E. L. Greda, M. D. Kunze, B. G. Marcot, J. F. Palmisano, R. W. Plotnikoff, W. G. Pearcy, C. A. Simenstad, & P. C. Trotter. 2000. _Pacific Salmon and Wildlife - Ecological Contexts, Relationships and Implica- tions for Management_. Special Edition Technical Report, Prepared for D. H. Johnson and T. A. O'Neil, Wildlife - Habitat Relationships in Oregon and Washington. Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, Olympia, Washington. Darimont, C. T. & T. E. Reimchen. 2002. Intra-hair stable isotope analysis implies seasonal shift to salmon in gray wolf diet. _Can. J. Zool._ 80: 1-5. Gilbert, B. K. & R. M. Lanner. 1995. Energy, diet selection and restoration of brown bear populations. Pp. 231-240. in _Proceedings of the 9th International Conference of Bear Research and Management_. Pateris: French Ministry of the Environment an the Natural History Museum of Grenoble. Hilderbrand, G. V., C. C. Schwartz, C. T. Robbins, M. E. Jacoby, T. A. Hanley, S. M. Arthur & C. Servheen. 1999. The impor- tance of meat, particularly salmon, to body size, population productivity, and conservation of North American brown bears. _Canadian Journal of Zoology_ 77: 132-138. Hocking, M. D. & T. E. Reimchen. 2002. Salmon-derived nitrogen in terrestrial invertebrates from coniferous forests of the Pacific Northwest. _BioMedCentral Ecology_ 2:4-14. Klinka, D.R. and T.E. Reimchen. 2002. Nocturnal and diurnal foraging behaviour of Brown Bears (_Ursus arctos_) on a salmon stream in coastal British Columbia. _Can. J. Zool._ 80:1317-1322. Mathewson, D., M.H. Hocking, & T. E. Reimchen . 2003. Nitrogen uptake in riparian plant communities across a sharp ecologi- cal boundary of salmon density. _BioMedCentral Ecology_ 2003:4. Reimchen, T. E. 1992. _Mammal and bird utilization of adult salmon in stream and estuarine habitats at Bag Harbour, Moresby Island_. Canadian Parks Service report, 28 p. Reimchen, T. E. 1994. _Further studies of black bear and chum salmon in stream and estuary habitats at Bag Harbour, Gwaii Haanas_. Canadian Parks Service document, 58 p. Reimchen, T. E. 1998. Nocturnal foraging behaviour of Black Bear, _Ursus americanus_, on Moresby Island, British Colum- bia. _Canadian Field-Naturalist_ 112: 446-450. Reimchen, T. E. 2000. Some ecological and evolutionary aspects of bear - salmon interactions in coastal British Columbia. _Can. J. Zool._ 78: 448-457. Reimchen, T. E. D. Mathewson, M. D. Hocking, J. Moran, & D. Harris. 2003. Isotopic evidence for enrichment of salmon- derived nutrients in vegetation, soil and insects in riparian zones in coastal British Columbia. _American Fisheries Society Symposium_ 34: 59-69. Stockner, J. G. & K. I. Ashley. 2003. Salmon nutrients: closing the circle. _American Fisheries Society Symposium_ 34: 3-15. Wipfli, M.S., J. Hudson, & J. Caouette. 1998. Influence of salmon carcasses on stream productivity: response of biofilm and benthic macroinvertebrates in southeastern Alaska, U.S.A. _Can. J. Fish. Aquat. Sci._ 55: 1503-1511. HANS ROEMER'S FOREST VEGETATION PH.D. THESIS ONLINE From: Adolf Ceska [aceska@telus.net] Roemer, Hans. 1972. _Forest vegetation and environments on the Saanich Peninsula, Vancouver Island_. Ph.D. Thesis, Univer- sity of Victoria, Victoria, BC. xvi+405 p. http://www.for.gov.bc.ca/hfd/library/documents/bib1024.pdf For over thirty years, Hans Roemer's thesis on forest class- ification on the Saanich Peninsula has been available only as photocopies at the University of Victoria library, on microfilm (e.g., the University of British Columbia library), or as photocopies of photocopies (e.g., Library of the British Colum- bia Ministry of Forests). This spring I managed to convince Hans that his thesis is still a relevant source of valuable phytosociological information and he gave his consent to putting his thesis on the British Colum- bia Ministry of Forests web site as a .pdf file. Rick Scharf and Steve Netherton scanned the original copy and converted it to pdf, and the BC Ministry of Forests library supervisor Roxanne Smith put it on their library web site. Many thanks to all people involved in this project! Here is the Abstract of Hans Roemer's thesis: The forest vegetation on the Saanich Peninsula, Vancouver Is- land, is classified in 7 associations, 12 subsassociations and 20 variants, on the basis of 400 releves. Communities are dis- tinguished by diagnostic species groups, which were derived by computer sorting of vegetation tables (Ceska and Roemer, 1971). The rationale of decisions in the classification process is discussed both in terms of floristic differentiation and numeri- cal similarity. Detailed descriptions of each community include its physiognomy and life forms, its diagnostic species groups, community statis- tics and habitat. Extensive vegetation tables form an important part of this work. Relationships of forest vegetation to environmental factors are considered at the level of single species, species groups and communities. Major habitat variables are correlated with species and species groups through non- parametric statistical methods. The main floristic gradient exhibited in ordered vegetation tables is recognized to be correlated with general moisture conditions. Most other environmental variables appear to coin- cide with and partly depend on moisture conditions. Soils, watertables and stand climates are described for subjec- tively selected stands representative of the communities. Soils are classified on the basis of 40 detailed soil profiles and 150 routine examinations by soil auger. Communities are strongly correlated with morphological types of profiles, but are only partly correlated with soil units of the current Canadian class- ification. Distinctive watertable types are found for the moist- site communities. Important differences are shown in maximum water levels, duration of high water levels, and range of watertable fluctuation for three major communities. Prediction of watertable conditions according to species composition is proposed. Succession and climax are discussed. The forest community on mesic sites is the _Pseudotsuga-Berberis_ association on Orthic Dystric Brunisols. Communities of the driest sites are the _Quercus-Erythronium_ and the _Arbutus-Pseudotsuga_ associa- tions, those on wettest sites the _Alnus-Athyrium_ and _Populus- Pyrus_ associations. The former occur on Lithic Sombric and Lithic Dystric Brunisols, and the latter on Organic soils and Gleysols. Only fragments of the _Pinus contorta_ bog forest remain. A reconstruction of the pattern of the original forest com- munities is attempted for valley sites now under agricultural use. The evaluation of an open, park-like landscape in the _Quercus_ vegetation complex is interpreted as a combined result of subregional climate, microclimate and early human history. ________________________________________________________________ Subscriptions: http://victoria.tc.ca/mailman/listinfo/ben-l Send submissions to aceska@victoria.tc.ca BEN is archived at http://www.ou.edu/cas/botany-micro/ben/ ________________________________________________________________