Plant Community History

A knowledge of how plants have responded to environmental change in the past is our principal source of evidence for predicting how they might respond to the new environments of the future and a knowledge of past climates may enable us to assess more clearly the human contribution to the climatic changes of the future. This book aims to present the results of investigations into the history of the world's plant cover over the last 65 million years, not the methods by which these results have been achieved, and to document a selection of published accounts, both general and specific, for further reading. The book is organized into four main sections, dealing successively with the tenet that modern plant distributions and communities have been moulded by long-term environmental change, the nature of global environmental change over the last 65 million years, the ways in which plants and plant communities have responded to environmental change, and the global history of forest, dryland and coldland communities over the last 65 million years. The final chapter considers the future.