A numerical classification of European Spartina communities

Summary The classical syntaxonomical treatment of the European Spartina communities as published in the series Prodrome of the the European plant communities, is compared with the results of a numerical treatment, based on largely the same set of relevés. 576 relevés, selected from the total salt marsh data set were subjected to agglomerative clustering with relocation with the similarity ratio as similarity measure. The resulting numerical system was compared with the syntaxonomical hierarchy. The correlation between both systems is close. The numerical units are slightly more heterogeneous because no purification occurred, which implies relevés to be left out of consideration. One new syntaxon, Spartinetum townsendii asteretosum tripolii, could be suggested from the results of the numerical treatment. Perspectives for the development of a numerical syntaxonomy are stressed.Communication number 40.