THE STATUS OF SYNTAXONOMY IN NORWAY

Abstract

In Norway syntaxonomical work started approximately at the same time in Central Europe. Nordhagen was the pioneer, making the basis for the classification of especially alpine communities, followed by Dahl and Gjaerevoll, also focusing on alpine vegetation. During the 1970-80’s a large number of syntaxonomical studies were made on a diversity of topics; most of these studies were never published. The rather species-poor flora and the difficulties of applying the concept of character species have caused Norwegian botanists to develop a classification system of their own, as a summary of present knowledge. The next step should be to rework a large number of relevès with numerical methods to form the basis of a national vegetation survey.