The Nomencalature of Plant Associations

Abstract

The obvious merits of the Zuirich school of plant ecology make it inevitable that its methods and nomenclature shall sooner or later have an American following. It would seem opportune, before all of the faults as well as the virtues of this school shall have been taken over, to criticize the inept and illconsidered nomenclature of plant associations which has been used in certain recent publications. It will be sufficient to draw examples from two works, Braun-Blanquet's Pflanzensoziologie (1928) and Riibel's Pflanzengesellschaften der Erde ( I930). The former work introduces a nomenclature of plant associations based upon their floristic composition rather than upon their physiognomy. This nomenclature is essentially sound and practical, and there is nothing fundamentally new about it. The floristic point of view is essentially that of folk ecology, and therefore its nomenclature may be traced back to ancient times. Braun-Blanquet's conception of an oak forest is probably the same as that of an intelligent peasant, and he calls it a qutercetumt, as a Roman peasant would have done. The idea of an oak forest is universal, of as great utility to scientists as to peasants, and we may well continue to use the good Latin word quercetum as an ecological term. We have inherited the concept and also the word. So far there is no ground for complaint. The difficulty arises when our author wants to be more specific and to express the idea of a particular kind of oak forest, one characterized, let us say, by Quercus pubescens. He could be definite and grammatical if he said querceturn Quercus pubescentis, but he is so fearful of using more than the minimum number of words with which the idea can possibly be expressed that he says merely querceturn pubescentis, which means nothing, since we have a binomial nomenclature in systematic biology. As we shall see, in the further development of his nomenclature he falls more and more into unintelligibility, and finally presents mere jargon for our acceptance. The basic units to which he wishes to apply names are plant associations such as the oak forest. As we have seen, names exist, or may be coined, following good classical precedent, and in so far as Braun-Blanquet has done this, his names are only to be commended. They are formed on the analogy