PLS 147 Study Guide - Comprehensive Final Exam Guide - California, Montane Ecosystems, Perennial Plant
Document Summary
Set of interacting plants that co-occur in a particular place and time. Also their characteristics like relative abundance and spatial distributions w/ animals and microbes w/ abiotic and landscape-scale aspects like nutrient cycling, topography, soils vegetation map. How they are often distributed is more variable. Lines are arbitrary sharp boundaries can occur when. A community dominante determines the presence/absence of many species. Eg timberline (edges of the trees b/c pine needles change the soil, etc), grasslands, sierra conifers. Succession after a fire plant communities are both real & imagined. even though boundaries are fuzzy and variable, it is still helpful for us to label them. What species are there and their relative abundance. Eg forest/grassland/shrubland community names are a mixture of both prairie. Eg coast redwood forest, oak woodland, perennial bunchgrass. Implies a certain height, cant see sky. Rare, very tall like forest trees canopy. And shrub layer woody understory (shrub layer) herbaceous understory (ground vegetation) herbaceous: not woody.
