Environmental Indication

Abstract

The need of man to adapt to or remodel his environment has induced not only the study of the vegetation as resource, but also as an indicator of that environment. He has learned to use observable reactions of living things to inform him about quality of climate, soil and water. To use vegetation mapping for this, is one of the means of biological indication, in this case on landscape scale. Other ways are using organelles, cells, tissues, single plants and animals, genotypical as well as pheno-typical (life-) forms, see for this Best and Haeck (eds.) 1982 and Environmental Monitoring and Assessment 3 (1983), Reidel Publ. Comp. and Steubing and H.J. Jäger (ed.) Junk Publ., The Hague 1982. The vegetation map contains information about environment in two ways. One is the information described in the legend on vegetation types about we know the ecological indication value. The other way is the form of the patterns of units that directly have to say something to the experienced reader.