1 - Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 September 2009
Summary
In the six decades since Sir Arthur Tansley first coined the word ecosystem, an enormous amount of ecological research has been carried out in every imaginable habitat on earth. Forests, grasslands, deserts, tundra, wetlands and oceans have all been mapped in their distribution on the earth's surface and have revealed their structure and some aspects of their function to ecologists. Until recently, however, vertical cliffs have been almost completely overlooked as subjects for ecological study, even though some workers in Europe have included areas of steep rock in analyses of vegetation communities. For example, McVean and Ratcliffe (1962) described plant communities for the Scottish highlands but only a handful of stands had slopes greater than 60° and only one had a slope value of 80°. In other words, cliffs as defined in this book were not really included even if subsequent authors said that they were. McVean and Ratcliffe were also aware of the difficulty in dealing with cliff vegetation at the community scale. They stated:
To many botanists this heterogeneous cliff vegetation is the most interesting of all but to the phytosociologist it is easily the most baffling. The larger, stable ledges usually bear tall herb communities and are amenable to the normal method of analysis but the open and patchy vegetation consisting of small herbs, sedges, grasses and bryophytes is very difficult to describe. … We have therefore analyzed only those cliff communities which provided stands of at least the normal minimal area of 2 × 2 m. … Description of the micro-communities naturally confined to open rocks is best reserved for detailed studies of individual rupestral species.
(McVean & Ratcliffe, 1962, p. 88)- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Cliff EcologyPattern and Process in Cliff Ecosystems, pp. 1 - 18Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000