A Brief Account of a Piece of Forest, Mainly Indigenous - Induced, Near Wellington, New Zealand, with Special Reference to its Principal Life-Forms

Abstract

a. General. Before the advent of the white man, the forests of New Zealand were, with but few exceptions, exactly as planted by Nature. Of course they showed wide divergenoies in composition and structure, and exhibited many types of succession leading up to a few well developed climax associations. With the coming of the white man and his numerous introduced animals together with his fires, the forests were exposed to conditions differing greatly from those to which they were accustomed, so that many new communities unknown in primitive New Zealand came into being. It is with one of these that I am dealing in this thesis, and am attempting to give some idea of its physiognomy and structure together with a brief account of the all-important life-forms of the species, and so far as the necessarily short time at my disposal has allowed, the reaction of such life-forms one upon another. It is, indeed, principally with a brief account of the life-forms that this thesis is concemed. In ecological botanical literature generally, but little is said about life-forms, yet it would be possible to give an account of most communities based on such forms, and such an account would tell far more than if merely the specific names of the plants were used. It is quite, common for one and the same species to have more than one life-form. This phenomenon is referred to later in C