This book was written 30 years ago as the first synthesis of European and Anglo-American methods in vegetation ecology. Upon its publication in 1974, it rapidly became the standard text for the study of vegetation in over 60 US colleges and universities. An unsolicited review appeared in Ecology 56: 1233 (1975) with the title "Getting It All Together in Plant Synecology." The book also received wide international acceptance. "In his foreword to the 1974 edition, Raymond Fosberg referred to this book as 'by far the best work of its scope that I know.' It is still agreed that there is no comparable work. It was used as the only textbook for the first twenty offerings of one graduate course. For the past dozen years it's been moved to the recommended list because it has been out of print. There have been several vegetation science textbooks published since 1974, but their foci have been on ordination and multivariate data analysis instead of on sampling methods. No other text has covered the subject of vegetation sampling design in such depth, breadth, and impartiality as this book, Aims and Methods of Vegetation Ecology.
