Quantitative Plant Ecology

Abstract

A GREAT deal of the literature of ecology is of a purely descriptive character, and it is not perhaps too much to say that many accounts of plant communities which are published to-day, if they add something to our information, add little to our knowledge. Such descriptions are too often the mere multiplication of examples, the working out of the same ideas upon other material without any enlargement of the philosophical concepts involved. Not the least of the debts which we owe to the Danish school of plant geographers and ecologists is that they have not been content to be merely imitators, but have extended the boundaries of our knowledge. In particular, we owe to Warming and Raunkiaer the recognition of the importance of autecological studies of which biology stands in such need to-day. But to Raunkiaer we also owe the application of exact quantitative methods to the analysis of vegetation and the statistical treatment of plant communities. The translation of Raunkiaer's works into English is therefore particularly welcome, since the original papers written in Danish have only been known to many workers from summaries.

The Life Forms of Plants and Statistical Plant Geography: being the Collected Papers of C. Raunkiaer.

Pp. xvi + 632 + 53 plates. (Oxford: Clarendon Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1934.) 35s. net.