Wk. Clatterbuck, A COMMUNITY CLASSIFICATION-SYSTEM FOR FOREST EVALUATION - DEVELOPMENT, VALIDATION, AND EXTRAPOLATION, Environmental monitoring and assessment, 39(1-3), 1996, pp. 299-321
A community classification system integrating vegetation and landforms
was developed br the 8,054-ha Cheatham Wildlife Management Area (CWMA
), located on the Western Highland Rim of Tennessee, USA, to obtain in
formation on which to base multiresource land management decisions. A
subjective procedure (synthesis tables) and several objective techniqu
es (factor analysis, cluster analysis, and canonical discrimination) w
ere used to evaluate importance values of overstory and midstory speci
es, coverage values of understory species, and topographic parameters.
These procedures were used collectively to guide and to provide evide
nce for interpretation of vegetational patterns on the landscape. The
eight discrete communities identified on a 482-ha compartment within t
he CWMA were: northern red oak (Quercus rubra L.), chestnut oak (Q. pr
inus L.), scarlet oak (Q. coccinea Muenchh.), yellow-poplar (Liriodend
ron tulipifera L.), sycamore-sweetgum (Platanus occidentalis L. - Liqu
idambar styraciflua L.), black oak-hickory (Q. velutina Lam. - Carya s
pp.), post oak (Q. stellata Wangenh.), and American beech (Fagus grand
ifolia Ehrh.) communities. The classification system was validated wit
h an independent data set. The eight communities were successfully ext
rapolated to an unsampled portion of the CWMA. Clearly, community anal
ysis can become an important facet in forest management and may play a
major role where a holistic understanding of vegetative relationships
is essential.