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BOOK REVIEWS

Biological Conservation 79 (1997) 111 115 Copyright © 1996 Elsevier Science Limited

Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved 0006-3207/97/$17.00 +.00

Sand Dune Vegetation Survey of Great Britain. Part I: England. By G. P. Radley. Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC). 1994. 126pp. ISBN 1 873701 19 5. Price £22-50 (pbk). Part 2: Scotland. JNCC. 1993. 113pp. ISBN 1 873701 20 9. Price £16.00 (pbk). Part 3: Wales. JNCC. 1995. 153pp. ISBN 1 873701 12 8. Price £26.00 pbk). The set of three parts. JNCC. 1SBN 873701 31 4. Price £55 (pbk).

These three volumes, part of the former Nature Conservancy Council's coastal ecology research pro- gramme, present the summary results of a survey which aimed to provide an inventory of the extent and types of coastal sand dune vegetation in Great Britain, allow a national assessment of each site's importance and provide baseline vegetation maps and descriptions for future work. Individual site reports are mostly unpub- lished documents held by the JNCC.

There is a section on methods, common to each vol- ume. The mapping of vegetation used the National Vegetation Classification (NVC), Britain's recently developed phytosociological classification of all its semi-natural vegetation. Surveyors also qualitatively recorded other features such as land use and evidence of erosion. A key aim of the survey was to find the total area of each NVC sub-community at each site and here the scale and level of funding of the survey allowed it to become more high-tech than most in Britain, with the majority of the site maps digitised for area measurement using ARCINFO. This is a digi- rising package which converts paper maps (analogue) to digitised polygons for computerised area measure- ment. These area measurements are fully tabulated in the results sections, which also summarily describe each sub-community (some of which did not easily fit into the NVC) and discusses rare and scarce vascular plants on dunes, land use, erosion and human impact.

Who might use these volumes? The results have been tabulated by administrative counties and one aim is clearly to give accurate answers to questions about the extent and distribution of vegetation types and so improve nature conservation evaluation and conse- quently site protection. These are basic data for plan- ners, nature conservationists and land managers. The surveys covered all English dune sites, almost all in Wales, but, presumably for lack of funding, only a sample 30% of the area or 5% of the sites in Scotland. This means that characterisation of typical dune vege- tation in each region of Scotland is not possible, as the report recognises. The Isle of Man and the Channel Islands are excluded since they are not part of the country agencies' remit. The volumes also provide a

good, if terse, introduction and site inventory to British sand dune vegetation, a habitat of considerable Euro- pean importance. The individual site reports must be invaluable baseline data for further projects and the methods section is a useful outline of how to analyse data from large-scale vegetation surveys. The brief com- munity descriptions are, incidentally, the best available summary of the NVC for sand dunes (still unpublished). Although there is inadequate information here to con- firm the identification of particular sub-communities, a combination of these descriptions and the software packages MATCH or TABLEFIT, which ascribe NVC community types to plant species lists, could be used to map and identify all British sand dune vegetation.

Paul Robinson and Penny Anderson

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Centres of Plant Diversity. Volume I Europe, Africa, South West Asia and the Middle east. Edited by S. D. Davis, V. H. Heywood & A. C. Hamilton. IUCN/ WWF, IUCN Publications Unit, Cambridge. 1994. 354 pp. ISBN 2 8317 0197 X. Price: £30.00 (hbk).

The Centres of Plant Diversity or 'CPD' project is a major international collaborative exercise, involving (we are told) 400 botanists and conservationists and 100 organizations: CPD marks a milestone in a contin- uing shift in the philosophy of nature conservation. The origins of modern nature conservation l i e in species conservation, but this focus shifted in the 1970s to a habitat conservation approach. The next shift (around the mid-1980s) was to a 'diversity within habi- tats' approach, managing habitats for maximum diver- sity - - and biodiversity became the all-important word. CPD marks an era of new realism, driven by pragmatic considerations of limited resources, and new geogra- phical (particularly GIS-based) thinking. The central question is how to prioritise the conservation of diver- sity-within-habitat by a spatial analysis of the distribu- tion of that diversity. Accordingly CPD owed its origin (in part) to a discussion meeting at Kew in 1982 where the pioneering and controversial paper by J. HalTer (Speciation in Amazonian forest birds. Science, N. E, 165, 131-37, 1969) was discussed - - an influential paper that attempts to analyse spatial pattern in biodiversity. How did CPD choose its own sampling strategy? Each site is said to have either at least a thousand species of which more than 10% are endemic to the site or to the region, or a very high number of strict endemics (to allow, very wisely, the inclusion of oceanic islands with depauperate floras but high endemism). This is very