Second Draft Report on Vegetation Classification for the Approval of the Vegetation Classification Pasture Research Conference.

Abstract

We have taken the view that in framing our own proposals we ought, as far as possible, to build upon the foundations already laid down by others who have faced the general problems of classification and short description of vegetation types. At the same time, we have scrutinized nomenclature and have not recommended any term for East African use if it is doubtfully applicable to our region, or if, though commonly used in one territory, it is liable to be unintelligible in another. Thus, we have avoided the use of East African vernaculars words, and have abandoned some commonly used imported ones (such as "savannah" and "veld") because of doubt whether they 'are correctly used out of their proper setting of our region is entirely within the tropics, and we have therefore dropped the adjectives "tropical", "subtropical and "temperature of our other departures from usage that has become common, though not standard, some are to avoid tautology, as our omission of "evergreen" from the terms for rain-forests, all of which are in the accepted sense evergreen; others are for the sake of not being too definite, as when the generic name Acacia is misleadingly used in terms covering associations from some of which acacias may be absent; and still others are made in order to adhere to the common meaning of words, as when we use "upland" instead of "mountain" or "montane• in some connections, many of our highland areas being uplands rather than mountains as ordinarily understood. We have not managed to avoid all inconsistencies, but we hope on balance to have made improvement