BIO120H1 Chapter 8: BIO120 2nd Semester Reading Part 8
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BIO120H1 Full Course Notes
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Lecture 21, 22 and part 8: clements" theory of plant communities. Clement argues that recognizable and repeatable plant associations occur because the constituent species were functionally dependent on each other"s presence. He likens a plant community to a superorganism. Particular plant communities are seen as belonging to discrete community types, e. g. beech-maple forest and oak-hickory forest. And true vegetation types are suggested to be separated by a special type of narrow transition zones he called ecotones. Clements" explanation is known as the organismal, holistic, community- unit, or closed-community hypothesis: gleason"s theory of plant communities. His underlying idea is ranges of tolerance and ecological gradient, that plant species should be found wherever the physical conditions of weather and soil are suitable, except in cases where they have not been able to disperse there. Therefore, species are distributed independently of each other; important limitations are (1) dispersal and (2) filtering by the physical environment.
