It occurs where the types of food and cover which it needs come together, i.e., where their edges meet.
In his 1933 classic Game Management, Leopold followed his usual habit of combining the dispassionate insights of an ecologist with those of a practiced woodsman and hunter to declare that “game is a phenomenon of edges. It was Wisconsin’s own Aldo Leopold, though, who emphasized the homelier word “edge” as a synonym for Clements’s ecotone, and who invented the label “edge effects” to describe interactions in the vicinity of such boundaries. 1 For Clements, the ability to draw a boundary around distinct plant formations was an essential first step toward naming those formations and describing their characteristics, thus laying the foundation for all subsequent ecological analysis. Frederic Edward Clements, one of the most important founders of plant ecology in the United States, was responsible for introducing the word “ecotone” to describe such boundaries in his pioneering early study of Nebraska vegetation. Those familiar with the history of ecology will probably remember that the concept of ecological “edges” emerged in the early twentieth century to describe biological interactions happening on the boundaries between different plant formations and habitat types.
#ECOTONE SUBMISSIONS MANUAL#
Frederic Edward Clements depicted a transect across an ecotone boundary in his classic manual on Plant Physiology and Ecology (New York: Henry Holt, 1907), 211.
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