Computer assisted vegetation analysis, Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 1991 Handbook of Vegetation Science Series, Vol. 11

There are many books and computer programs dealing look ahead rather than pondering the past. This is a with data analysis. It would be easy to count at least a manual of recent views that evolved in the study of hundred, yet few of these would show applications in vegetation. This book is intended to emphasize the new vegetation science. Today in the face of environmental acquisitions which we believe significantly affect the degradation caused by anthropogenic pressures on the future of vegetation analysis: biosphere there is added urgency to study vegetation 1. Vegetation is a 'fuzzy' system, it must be treated as processes and dynamics in order to understand their role such at the set level, where the idea ofconceptualized in regulating the water, oxygen and the carbon cycles, in patterns must drive the research design. relation to global warming and ozone layer depletion. It 2. Vegetation cannot be seen only in the perspective of a is well known that ecology was developed first in vegeta­ traditional taxonomy based on the species concept; tion studies (see Acot 1989) but after an active period character sets of ecological value must enter into marked by intensive phytoclimatic and synecological consideration and a hierarchical analysis of patterns studies, vegetation science entered in a rather dormant and processes should be the basis of comparisons. period. Other ecological disciplines such as animal popu­ 3.

I.- 1. The properties and interpretation of observations in vegetation study.- Sampling.- 2. Computerized sampling in vegetation studies.- 3. Sampling with multiple objectives and the role of spatial autocorrelation.- 4. On sample size optimality in ecosystem survey.- 5. Statistics in ecosystem survey: computer support for process-based sample stability tests and entropy/information inference.- 6. Computer simulation and sampling efficiency.- Databases.- 7. The relational model for data bases in community studies.- Characters and Character Selection.- 8. On character-based plant community analysis: choice, arrangement, comparison.- 9. Fuzzy components in community level comparisons.- 10. Fuzzy linguistics concept in redescription of vegetation data.- 11. A comparison of some methods of selecting species in vegetation analysis.- Similarity Measures.- 12. Mutational and nonmutational similarity measures: a preliminary examination.- 13. Application of probabilistic methods in the analysis of phytosociological data.- Classification.- 14. Knowing when to stop: cluster concept—concept cluster.- 15. Fuzzy clustering of ecological data.- 16. A method for generating consensus partitions and its application to community classification.- 17. A general strategy for the simultaneous classification of variables and observations in ecological data tables.- Evaluation of Classification.- 18. Locality theory: the phenomenon and its significance.- 19. Permutation techniques based on euclidean analysis spaces: a new and powerful statistical method for ecological research.- 20. Comparison of fuzzy classifications.- Ordination.- 21. Flexible gradient analysis: a note on ideas and an application.- 22. Ordination based on classification: yet another solution?.- 23. Syntaxonomy: a source of useful fuzzy sets for environmental analysis?.- 24. Community niche, an effective concept to measure diversity of gradients and hyperspaces.- 25. On niche separation and its measurement.- 26. Autocorrelation for measuring predictivity in community ecology: an example with structural and chorological data from mixed forest types of NE Italy.- 27. Testing for elliptical clusters in ecological multidimensional spaces.- 28. Spatial interpolation methods for interpretation of ordination diagrams.- 29. Coexistence of competing populations along an environmental gradient: a simulation study.- 30. Regression modelling of perturbation in some vegetation types.- Analysis of Spatial Patterns.- 31. The measurement of horizontal patterns in vegetation: a review and proposals for models.- 32. Trend surface analysis and splines for pattern determination in plant communities.- 33. Edge detection in vegetation: Jornada revisited.- 34. Spatial competition models for plant populations.- II Computer Packages.- 35. DENT: A PASCAL program for vegetation data entry into microcomputers.- 36. Introduction to data analysis: a comprehensive program package for personal computers.- 37. MULVA-4, a processing environment for vegetation analysis.- 38. FIVEPA, a program package to perform comparisons of sets by information and other functions.- 39. SYN-TAX IV. Computer programs for data analysis in ecology and systematic.- 40. Probabilistic methods in classification: a manual for seven computer programs.- 41. NICHE — Programs for niche breadth, overlap and hypervolumes.- 42. PATT — Spatial autocorrelation analysis: computer program and examples of application with data sets of grassland vegetation under a natural reforestation process in the Karst near Trieste.