The natural communities of the world are diverse, and many schools of
ecology have developed classifications of communities in partial
independence of one another. There is consequently a vast and widely
dispersed literature on the classification of plant and animal
communities, comprising divergent approaches of different schools and
representing a great experiment on the usefulness of different
possibilities for classification. The editor sought in a re- view
monograph of 1962 to summarize these schools and their history, and in
1973 published a treatise on 'Ordination and Clas- sification of
Communities' as volume 5 of the Handbook of Vegetation Science. We were
fortunate, in preparing the latter work, to have a truly international
panel of authors to discuss different major ap- proaches to
classification. This second edition of the book of 1973 is intended to
make the work more widely available in a less expensive form as
companion volumes on ordination and on classification of plant
communities.