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Classification of vegetation has a long and colorful history in such disciplines as Ecology and Plant Geography, perhaps in its earliest forms predating these fields. It remains a popular and persistent field of scientific inquiry (and of invention of hierarchical schemes of community organization ad nauseam). The latter is attested to by the latest effort of the Ecological Society of America and The Nature Conservancy to "re-invent" a taxonomic hierarchy of North American vegetation-perhaps by coining new terms for existing units—even though much of the natural flora has been largely modified or even destroyed by human activity.
The "been there; done that" (already and repeatedly) history of vegetation classification has itself been reviewed, at least in part, by several workers. Readers desiring an unabridged account are referred to Whittaker (1962), Shimwell (1971), and Mueller-Dombois and Ellenberg (1974). Current classification "goings-on" can be found in contemporary Plant Ecology texts (eg. Chapter 10 of Barbour et al., 1999).
Developing still yet another vegetation classification scheme requires no experimentation (in addition, it traditionally has often been descriptive and arbitrary). Thus, such scholarship can be done "on the cheap" and without career-threatening criticisms such as allegations of "pseudo-replication". The net result is a mind-boggling array of "systems" among which there is both much overlap and confusion. Much of this appears to result from the plethora of units of vegetation and/or levels of organizational hierarchy used to describe and imaginatively arrange the vegetation.
Throughout the long and tortured lineage of Vegetation Science systems (long before this newer term), two of the surviving units and terms have been:
Association as a term (and probably the concept) is traceable to Friedrich Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt, according to standard Plant Ecology texts (eg. Daubenmire, 1968; Barbour et al., 1999). Vegetation type was attributed to August Griseback by Braun-Blanquet (1932, p. 302), the latter of whom warned readers to use the term "with caution". Association and vegetation type date back to the Nineteenth Century and the founding fathers of Plant Geography, and precise meanings of these two most enduring (and probably most useful) terms for units of vegetation have eluded ecologists ever since. This has been in spite of the fact that association was adopted by the Third International Botanical Congress in 1910 as the official term for the basic unit of vegetation classification (Daubenmire, 1968, p. 27).
Apparently, ecologists, plant geographers, vegetation scientists, as well as ecological practitioners like foresters and rangemen can agree on the validity of these terms, just not where to put them in an arbitrary organization of vegetation that extends from the broadest to the most restrictive floristic unit. Hence the response is to create a "new" classification, usually another elaborate scheme with many or most of the existing terms rearranged, which of course portends to eliminate all the ambiguity of all its predecessors.
Fortunately for practitioners and scientists in Range Management and Forestry, there is no real need for all of these hierarchical levels and units for either on-the-ground management or useful research that can be applied to this management. The term and concept of vegetation type at the larger or more general scale and that of range and forest site at the smaller, more restrictive scale seem to have served these professions and related ones like Wildlife Management adequately.
To be sure, the politically correct (and expedient) high-profile members of these natural resource disciplines have attempted recently to soften the commodity and industrial-professional traditions that brought them into existence in the first place. For example, some within the Range Management profession object to such professional terms as range and the very symbol of our profession, the beloved Trail Boss. The "image" of "cowboy" or "livestock management" is somehow allegedly offensive to some folks and, by extension, interferes with "recruitment" to the profession and almost assuredly to membership growth in the Society for Range Management. (One suspects that the caduceus with its two snakes coiled around a winged staff would be equally repulsive, and a lot less representative, in symbolizing Medicine.) One apparent response to this deny-our-professional-heritage attitude was to supplant the term range site with ecological site (as if we manage "ecologicals" instead of ranges), but everyone knows that the "more ecologically friendly" ecological site and traditional range site are the same (Jacoby, 1989; Bedell, 1998). So there is no problem in communication, injured professional pride and reduced precision of language notwithstanding.
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