Ecological interpretation of plant communities by classification and ordination of quantitative soil characteristics

Abstract

An agglomerative cluster analysis and a principal components analysis of habitat, based on 27 quantitative soil variables, are compared with a Braun-Blanquet classification of the vegetation of the Manyeleti Game Reserve in the eastern Transvaal. The results indicate that these techniques can be successfully used to obtain relatively homogeneous habitat classes, characterized by sets of environmental (soil) variables and not only single variables individually, and which are furthermore significantly correlated with the recognized plant communities of the area.