Community Concepts in Plant Ecology: from Humboldtian Plant Geography to the Superorganism and Beyond : Volume 13, Issue 1 (13/12/2013)

By Nicolson, M.

Book Id: WPLBN0004023317
Format Type: PDF Article :
File Size: Pages 8
Reproduction Date: 2015

Title:	Community Concepts in Plant Ecology: from Humboldtian Plant Geography to the Superorganism and Beyond : Volume 13, Issue 1 (13/12/2013)
Author:	Nicolson, M.
Volume:	Vol. 13, Issue 1
Language:	English
Subject:	Science, Ecology
Collections:	Periodicals: Journal and Magazine Collection, Copernicus GmbH
Historic Publication Date:	2013
Publisher:	Copernicus Gmbh, Göttingen, Germany

Member Page:	Copernicus Publications
Citation APA MLA Chicago Nicolson, M. (2013). Community Concepts in Plant Ecology: from Humboldtian Plant Geography to the Superorganism and Beyond : Volume 13, Issue 1 (13/12/2013). Retrieved from http://gutenberg.cc/

Description
Description: Centre for the History of Medicine, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, G12 8RT, UK. The paper seeks to provide an introduction to, and review of, the history of concepts of the plant community. Eighteenth-century naturalists recognised that vegetation was distributed geographically and that different species of plants and animals were interconnected in what would later be called ecological relationships. It was not, however, until the early nineteenth century that the study of vegetation became a distinctive and autonomous form of scientific inquiry. Humboldt was the first to call communities of plants associations. His programme for the empirical study of plant communities was extended by many European and North American botanists, throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. There developed an almost complete consensus among ecologists that vegetation was made up of natural communities, discrete entities with real boundaries. However, there was little agreement about the nature of the putative unit or how it should be classified. Gleason advanced the alternative view that vegetation was an assemblage of individual plants, with each species being distributed according to its own physiological requirements and competitive interactions. This debate was never wholly resolved and the divergent opinions can be discerned within early ecosystem theory.

Summary
Community concepts in plant ecology: from Humboldtian plant geography to the superorganism and beyond

Excerpt
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