Community concepts in plant ecology: from Humboldtian plant geography to the superorganism and beyond

摘要

The paper seeks to provide an introduction to, and review of, the history ofconcepts of the plant community. Eighteenth-century naturalists recognisedthat vegetation was distributed geographically and that different species ofplants and animals were interconnected in what would later be calledecological relationships. It was not, however, until the early nineteenthcentury that the study of vegetation became a distinctive and autonomous formof scientific inquiry. Humboldt was the first to call communities of plants"associations". His programme for the empirical study of plant communitieswas extended by many European and North American botanists, throughout thenineteenth and into the twentieth century. There developed an almost completeconsensus among ecologists that vegetation was made up of naturalcommunities, discrete entities with real boundaries. However, there waslittle agreement about the nature of the putative unit or how it should beclassified. Gleason advanced the alternative view that vegetation was anassemblage of individual plants, with each species being distributedaccording to its own physiological requirements and competitive interactions.This debate was never wholly resolved and the divergent opinions can bediscerned within early ecosystem theory.