An Introduction to Vegetation Analysis: Principles, practice and interpretation

1 Introduction.- Nature of vegetation and analytical approaches.- Purposes of vegetation analysis.- Phytosociological and more objective methods.- Samples.- Types of data.- 2 Field methods.- Primary survey – many species.- More detailed field work – one or a few species.- Plotless sampling.- 3 Fundamental principles of analytical methods.- The geometric model.- Classification and ordination.- Normal and inverse analyses.- Qualitative and quantitative data.- Species of low occurrence in a data set – retain or discard?.- 4 Case studies – introduction.- Artificial Data.- Iping Common – a lowland heath.- Coed Nant Lolwyn – a deciduous wood.- 5 Association between species and similarity between stands.- Concepts.- Qualitative data.- Quantitative data.- Comparisons of similarity coefficients.- 6 Classification.- Normal Association Analysis.- Types of classification.- Divisive monothetic methods.- Agglomerative polythetic methods.- Divisive polythetic methods.- Comparison of the methods by the examples results.- Inverse classifications.- Nodal Analysis (Lambert & Williams 1962).- 7 Ordination.- A classification of ordinations.- Direct Gradient Analysis – one factor.- Direct Gradient Analysis – many factors.- Indirect Gradient Analysis – one factor.- Indirect Gradient Analysis – many factors (ordination sensu stricto).- Polar ordination.- Non-polar ordination.- Comparisons of ordination methods.- 8 Correlations between vegetation and environment.- Single species.- Several species.- Environmental factors in associations.- 9 Case studies analyses.- Iping Common.- Coed Nant Lolwyn.- Concluding remarks on vegetation analysis results.- References.- Indices.