Vegetable Formation

In Botanical and Biogeography, a vegetable formation indicates a community of plant species, characterized by a certain aspect, and which determines a characteristic landscape. This aspect, one also says, “vegetation”, which allows to make a general description on extended an enough scale, depends on the species which compose the vegetable formation and on the medium which accommodates them.

One distinguishes for example, the Forêt, the Mangrove, the Steppe, the Savane, the Lande, etc

One can specify, inside these main categories of the more precise vegetable formations by taking account of the ecological conditions which characterize them: one can kind distinguish it various types of Forêt S or Lande S.

An international classification of the vegetable formations, established in 1973 by FAO thus distinguished from them 225 different types in a coherent classification.

This classification retains five classes of fundamental formations:

closed Forests
clear Forests
Bushes and lined
Sub-shrubs and Moor S low
herbaceous Vegetation

These basic classes are then divided each one into subclasses:

Sempervirentes
Décidues
Xéromorphiques, etc

In each subclass one distinguishes then from the formations and the under-formations.

However, with the progress made in the fields of the Chorologie and the Phytosociology, this concept tends to being abandoned to be replaced by that more precise of vegetable Groupement, which takes account of the precise Espèce S which compose the community and of the way in which they are associated.

See too

ecological Biome
Classification of the grounds
List of the vegetable formations
écorégion

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