General Ecological Bases

General Ecological Bases

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    As this is not a treatise on ecology, but rather an attempt to view some of great challenges and issues of agricultural and forestry development against an ecological principles to several points of practical significance.

    Accepting ecology as the study of the reciprocal relations of living organisms-plants, animals and man-and their environment and to Curtis’s inclusion of the study of material and energy changes in biotic communities, I need add a few additional thoughts only. Ecology is not a science in itself but rather an approach to the study of the environment, the individual organisms and the communities associated there with, the responses of the various forms of life to the environment and the resultant influence of these responses upon that environment. (Vide Fraser Darling (1960 et sec.); Cragg (1962, 1964); Macfadyen and Newbould (1964) and Phillips (1966A, 1966B) for recent views).

    As our knowledge of biotic communities-plants, animals and, where appropriate, man living together in co-operation and competition-is stilllocal and meagre only, it is not yet possible to attempt to classify the tropics and subtropics into major and lesser biotic entities. Because our knowledge of communities of plants is certainly a good deal more extensive, we must use-for many years to come-plant communities as indicators (Clements, 1920; Phillips, 1928A, 1928B, 1959B) of the prime features of the environment and thus of its broad potentialities for various kins of crop and livestock and forest management and production.

    In order to bring out the fundamental relationship of vegetation and the major climatic factors-humidity, precipitation, radiation (light and heat), wind and evaporating power of the air—I adopt the short-cut device of using a variant of the concept of the bioclimate—controlling the vegetation within a natural region. In this sense a bioclimatic region is constituted as the outcome of a certain interplay of climatic factors and biotic phenomena, so integrated as to permit the  development of natural vegetation to a stage is the climax or final expression of the interplay of climatic and biotic phenomena—examples being forest, true garssland, subdesert and desert. Where the development is their retarded or inhibited by some influence—often man-induced—the prevailing temporary bioclimatic unit remains at a point either one stage or any bumber of stages below the climax: the subclimax or proclimax respectively (Clements, 1936).

A wooded savanna is a common example of such non climax stages in the tropics and subtropics. But it is important to stress that no serious student of ecology, agriculture and forestry would be prepared to rest the matter of the indicator significance of biclimatic regions, subregions and lesser entities upon climatic and vegetation phenomena only. He must include the physical, nutrient and biotic factors of the soil, because of their fundamental influence in conditioning the precise vegetation community and in determining the potential productivity of a bioclimatic locality.
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