Patterns in Vegetation Succession, an Ecomorphological Study

Abstract

Traditionally there are two largely independent sets of concepts for the description of assemblages of plants: those pertaining to ‘populations’ and those pertaining to ‘vegetation’. To bridge the gap between them, we cannot confine ourselves to the original sets of concepts because each represents a different and incompatible global description, obtained by different ways of averaging. Nevertheless they describe the same ‘object’. Relating population and vegetation concepts can be done via a microscopic description sufficient to generate this object, which in turn can be described (amongst others) in terms of populations and/or vegetation by appropriate methods of averaging. The relations between descriptions in terms of populations and in terms of vegetation are shown to depend on variation in the microscopic structure of plant assemblages, which should be defined in terms of local interactions between local entities such as individual plants or small areas. The concepts ‘scale’ and ‘detail’ are important in our discussion.