Summary
The distributions of 54 plant families in 105 samples were studied to determine their indicator value in the vegetation of the Pacific Northwest. Families may be characteristic of particular environments or geographic conditions or they may distinguish between sets of samples. Principal components analysis, numerical classification, and stepwise discriminant analysis were used in this study.
Principal components analysis identifies a family if it is common or dominant and has a distribution concentrated at one extreme of an axis of variation. Families with consistent patterns of distribution are useful in distinguishing between groups of samples previously created by numerical classification methods.
Twenty-three families that contain environmental, successional, or geographical information were identified according to one or more methods.
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Nomenclature for species names in Washington follows Hitchcock & Cronquist (1973). Species names from the Alsek River, Yukon Territory, follows authorities cited by Douglas (1974).
This study was funded in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation and by the Graduate School, University of Washington. We thank A.R. Kruckeberg, M.J. Cushman, R.A. Lerner, V. Seymour and A.F. Watson for thoughtful comments and stimulating discussion and R.W. Fonda, R.T. Kuromoto, G.W. Douglas and J.A. Belsky for the use of their data.
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Del Moral, R., Denton, M.F. Analysis and classification of vegetation based on family composition. Vegetatio 34, 155–165 (1977). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00055212
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00055212