Environmental structures and variation in coastal vegetation of the Golfe du Lion (France)

✍ Scribed by Corre, J. J.

• Publisher: Springer-Verlag
• Year: 1985
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 468 KB
• Volume: 61
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1573-5052
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00039806

✦ Synopsis

On the French Mediterranean seashore, the essential environmental factors are: salinity, humidity, human activity, instability, and nature of the soil. Each of these factors presents a large range of variation. According to the values and the rhythm of changes presented by each of them a hierarchy of impacts has been established. As a consequence one ecological impact or another may be the result of the occurrence of mosaics in the plant cover. Thus, to explain the structures observed, it is necessary to distinguish between homogeneous systems in the landscape characterized by a similar hierarchy of impacts of the master factors. Analyses prove that vegetation units are either independent of each other (they are the reflection of a geomorphological structure, of climatic differences or of human influences), or organized into more or less complex phytoecological systems in which the mosaic of plant associations is governed by the activity of plant interactions. Some examples from salt ponds and sand dune systems explain these conclusions.