July 8 -13, 1985, an international group of scientists met in Uppsala
for a symposium on the subject 'Theory and models in Vegetation science'
. A volume of over 70 extended abstracts had already been published in
time for the symposium (Leemans et at., 1985). That volume included
contributions from nearly all of those who gave talks or presented
posters at the symposium. The present volume represents the
fully-refereed proceedings of the symposium and features articles by a
majority of speakers, plus a handful by poster authors, and two that
were sent independently to Vegetatio and seemed timely and relevant to
the symposi- um's theme. As organizers, we tried to bring together for
the symposium people whose interests covered several key aspects of
modern vegetation science: vegetation dynamics, on shorter or longer
time scales; the analysis of community data, and of
vegetation-environment relationships in both time and space; and the
functional basis of vegetation in terms of the individual plants and
plant populations that it comprises. We encouraged contributors to focus
on theory and models - not necessarily mathematical models, but also
conceptual models that might contribute to the development of theory and
mathematical models.