Classification trends during the past 60 years to serve different management needs are reviewed. These trends include the adaptation of European vegetation typology to Canadian conditions, the delineation of regions meaningful to forest management, the classification of forest ecosystems relevant to silviculture and of broader landscapes appropriate for integrated resource management and, finally, prime-site classification combining land features and technologic and socio-economic criteria to serve modern rationalization of management. Key words: Site classification, land classification, ecosystem classification, vegetation typology, ecological regions, forest ecology, land use planning, Canada.
Problems arise in the use of understory vegetation as an indicator of site condition in that impermanent factors such as microclimate, succession, and chance may play significant roles in determining local composition. Residual ordination analysis is a method which facilitates quantification of the sources of variation in understory vegetation over a landscape. Here it is applied to survey data, representing 250 stands upon which the forest ecosystem classification programme for the Clay Belt portion of northeastern Ontario is based, to test the premise that vegetation types will differentiate soil conditions for forestry purposes. Ordination of the data by detrended correspondence analysis yielded a bivariate scatterplot which, through visual appraisal, seemed readily interpretable in terms of site-related nutrient and moisture gradients. Formal exploration, using canonical redundancy analysis, yielded the following predictive model: understory vegetation (detrended correspondence analysis axes 1 and 2) = soils (67%) + canopy (8%) + succession (1%) + error (24%). Extraction of residual ordinations confirmed this general model and demonstrated that although canopy and successional influences are minor in the data, they are significant. Because the nonsite-related, predictable components account for only 9% of the variation at most, the premise of the existing forest ecosystem classification system is judged to be sound insofar as the data upon which it is based adequately describe the range of commercial stand conditions normally encountered. The results are discussed in relation to vegetation survey design and the performance of residual ordination analysis on a large data set is assessed.
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