Open Collections

Scientia silvica extension series, no. 38

Forest Sciences Department, University of British Columbia

Vegetation science, like any science, uses classification to organize knowledge about plants and plant communities. Classification is helpful for understanding how different plant communities relate to one another and their environments, for facilitating further studies of vegetation, and for conservation. To familiarize onself with vegetation of a large area, it is very convenient and efficient to begin with a few general units, such as plant orders rather than with many very detailed units, such as plant associations and subassociation. We offer such an approach and think that the information given in this series will be sufficient to assign any forested coastal community to one the orders or suborders. In spite of a history of vegetation studies in British Columbia, there has not yet been any attempt to develop a comprehensive hierarchical classification of plant communities for the province. As the culmination of fifty years of detailed surveys carried out by V.J. Krajina and his students, the Ecology Program Staff of the BC Forest Service, and other workers, we used tabular and multivariate analyses of 3,779 sample plots established in natural, old-growth, submontane, montane, and subalpine forest communities in coastal BC to develop a hierarchy of vegetation units according to the methods of biogeoclimatic ecosystem classification.

Coastal BC; Coastal British Columbia; Classification; Ecosystem classification; Plants -- Classification; Tree orders; Plant orders; Plant communities; Forest ecology; Vegetation; Krajina, V. J. (Vladimir Josef), 1905-; Natural forests

Text

eng

Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library

10.14288/1.0107263

Forestry, Faculty of; Forest Sciences, Department of

Faculty