Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Box 1.2 (
cont.
)
MTV: acronym for mediterranean-type vegetation often forming closed-
canopy shrublands, woodlands and forests dominated by sclerophyllous-leaved
evergreen plants and dominant in MTCs but can be important in non-MTC
regions
obligate resprouter: a plant that regenerates after fire solely by vegetative
resprouts and recruits seedlings during the inter-fire interval (see fire-independ-
ent recruitment)
postfire seeder: a plant that recruits seedlings in a postfire pulse of recruit-
ment. Taxa may be either “obligate seeder” that does not resprout, or “facul-
tative seeder” that recruits seedlings in a postfire pulse of recruitment and
resprouts after fire
Raunkiaer life forms: a French system for classifying plant growth forms
and largely replaced in this topic as follows:
phanerophytes with buds
25 cm above ground - trees and shrubs
chamaephytes with buds near the ground - suffrutescents of low subshrubs
hemicryptophytes with buds at the soil surface - herbaceous perennials
cryptophytes with buds below ground - geophytes
therophytes have no perenniating buds - annuals
sclerophyllous leaves: evergreen leaves with hard surface layers of cells often
with embedded hard sclerid cells
WUI: acronym for wildland-urban interface, the boundary between wild-
lands and urban, suburban or peri-urban (transition zone between urban and
rural) development
>
Program (IBP) project, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and
led by Dr. Harold Mooney, comprised one of the most intensive studies of the
idea that phylogenetically unrelated organisms occupying similar ecological
niches in similar environments become more similar than their ancestors (Blon-
del
1991
). This IBP project extended the concept by testing the hypothesis that
entire communities of plants and animals would converge under similar environ-
mental conditions. Certainly as important as the outcome of those studies was
the fact that this research initiated a trajectory of research collaborations that
resulted in an extraordinary transfer of ideas across these five MTC regions of
the world (
Appendix 1.1
)
.
The ecosystem convergence concept has been lauded as having led to important
comparative findings on the structure and function of different ecosystems
developing under different climates (Mooney & Dunn
1970
; Orians & Solbrig
1977
; Cody & Mooney
1978
). The concept is viewed as independent evidence that
characteristics of organisms are predictable from features of their environment,
and thus rightly viewed as adaptive traits. This perspective, however, has not been
