VEGETATION OF THE GLACIER LAKES ECOSYSTEM EXPERIMENTS SITE

Vegetation at the Glacier Lakes Ecosystem Experiment Site, a 600 ha re search site at 3200 to 3500 m elevation in the Snowy Range of southeas tern Wyoming, was categorized and described from an intensive sampling of species abundances. A total of 304 vascular plant taxa were identi fied through collection and herbarium documentation. Plots with tree s pecies were separated from those without tree species for ordination a nd classification analyses. Detrended correspondence analysis was used to order plots along major axes of composition variation, which are i nferred moisture and topographic gradients. Cluster analysis was used to categorize plots based on composition similarity. The resulting gro ups were named according to species dominants. We identified and descr ibed in detail 4 meadow, 4 thicket or scrub, 3 krummholz, and 2 forest plant associations.