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- Title
THE TROPICAL FOREST AND SPORNE'S ADVANCEMENT INDEX.
- Authors
Wood, D.
- Abstract
Sporne found certain characters of dicotyledonous plants were correlated and also well represented in fossil Tertiary floras. He showed that this correlation could be explained by assuming the characters to be primitive and proposed an advancement index based on the proportion of these characters found in each family. By measuring the average advancement index of vegetation from different habitats and of the London Clay Flora, which is the Tertiary flora taken by Sporne as an ancestral standard, it is shown here that there is a clear relationship between the supposed primitive characters and woody habitats. As an alternative to Sporne's hypothesis that the correlated characters are primitive it is suggested that the correlations are a result of the adaptive nature of the characters, the supposedly primitive characters being adaptive to the woody habit, the supposedly advanced characters being adaptive to the herbaceous habit.
- Subjects
PALEOBOTANY; BOTANY; VEGETATION surveys; TERTIARY paleopedology; HABITATS; FOREST ecology
- Publication
New Phytologist, 1970, Vol 69, Issue 1, p113
- ISSN
0028-646X
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/j.1469-8137.1970.tb04055.x