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The plant communities of Macquarie Island: Mappable entities or pareidolic illusions?

conference contribution
posted on 2023-05-24, 10:31 authored by Bricher, PK
Mapping plant communities is core business for many geographers and conservation ecologists. However a troubling assumption underpins these maps and it frequently remains unexamined, despite almost a century of criticism. Are the communities real, discrete assemblages that can be expected to respond to environmental change uniformly and therefore be treated as valis scientific units? Instability and ambiguity in community definitions pose serious problems when such maps are used to measure the ecological impacts of environmental change or management interventions. On Macquarie Island, researchers have historically defined plant communities in conflicting ways. Tall tussock vegetation on the coastal slopes might constitute a single community, ot three, or seven, or nine. We examined the capacity of statistical clustering tools to distinguish floristic communities on the basis of a large, stratified-random dataset, and the stability of the resulting clusters. We were unable to produce stable clusters and suggest that mapping individual species is more likely to be useful gor detecting changes in vegetation patterns.

History

Publication title

School of Geography & Environmental Studies Conference 2011

Editors

School of Geography & Environmental Studies

Pagination

x-x

Department/School

School of Geography, Planning and Spatial Sciences

Publisher

University of Tasmania

Place of publication

Hobart

Event title

School of Geography & Environmental Studies Conference 2011

Event Venue

Hobart

Date of Event (Start Date)

2011-06-28

Date of Event (End Date)

2011-06-29

Repository Status

  • Restricted

Socio-economic Objectives

Assessment and management of Antarctic and Southern Ocean ecosystems

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