The Whole Pattern

Abstract

The Exploration of communities and ecosystems can be followed by many routes, all of them very difficult. The journey is slow, like taking a camel caravan over dry country. The white bones of some earlier expeditions lie on the sand, having failed to carry their loads of physiological concepts, graeco-roman technical terms or useless adaptive ‘explanations’ even to the first oasis on the way. Others, loaded differently, with great burdens of species lists, coefficients of association and trellis diagrams, algebraic ‘habitat niches’, or primitive food-cycle diagrams, have gone further, perhaps to the second or third oases. The outcome is still to be decided, and I believe it will serve little purpose to drag into the present statement of conclusions all these other methods of approach to the problem. Our own journey has been in two parts: in the first ten years workable methods of handling large amounts of information from field investigations without losing track of their validity or meaning were devised and set up in action. These are recounted in Ch. 1–5, where the patterns of interspersion are analysed into their components and the criteria for arranging them discussed. In the second ten years, the methods have been consistently applied to the elucidation of a terrestrial ecosystem with its concomitant small water bodies (Ch. 6–18). From the second oasis camp it is now possible to look back and try to assess what discoveries have been made during the journey.