A generic plant functional attribute set and grammar for vegetation description and analysis

Gillison, A.N., Carpenter, G. 1995. A generic plant functional attribute set and grammar for vegetation description and analysis . CIFOR Working Paper No.3. 12p.

Conventional descriptive methods rarely convey the behavioural information needed to conserve and manage the world's vegetation. Such information may be derived from a generic set of plant functional attributes (PFAs). A grammar provides a syntactic rule base for generating and comparing coherent models of individual plant behaviour based on PFA combinations rather than discrete attributes. The method facilitates rapid and uniform assessment of plant response to environmental change at varying spatial scales regardless of species.