Locality Theory: The Phenomenon and its Significance

Abstract

Species ranking at various dichotomies of the dendrogram has been illustrated. It must be emphasized that not only those species which show marked changes in rank are of interest, but also those which remain more or less consistently important, either in one branch of the dendrogram, or, in some cases, in several branches. It is felt most strongly that the dynamic changes in species importance direct attention to fundamental questions regarding the current use of species data in the elucidation of vegetation pattern. The programs were written in BASIC for a PDP-1090 computer, and have now been developed to the point where both speed and core requirements are quite acceptable, though transfer to a microcomputer would require memory expansion. Copies of the programs are available from the authors.