2 days ago
Nature Trail: IVC - A new Irish vegetation classification system for all communities of wild plants
IVC is an acronym that was a new one in my vocabulary until it was explained that it stood for the 'Irish Vegetation Classification', a recent concept and a completely new system of classifying vegetation throughout Ireland.
In the past, people used the German Braun-Blanquet system or the British NVC system to describe vegetation in Ireland. While both systems are excellent, they presented difficulties in fitting foreign systems to the unique situation that prevails in Ireland.
Dr Philip Perrin, a botanist and Director of Ecology at BEC Consultants in Dublin, has now devised a totally new, specifically Irish system and it is explained in a recent publication titled the 'Handbook for the Irish Vegetation Classification'.
The 163-page handbook is published by the Waterford-based National Biodiversity Data Centre and is funded by the National Parks and Wildlife Service. The book divides all Irish vegetation types into 14 broad divisions ranging from grasslands to woodlands, sand dunes, bogs, freshwater, and so on, and breaks these down into 186 distinct communities.
We are all familiar with the concept of plant communities. Without a need to be able to identify the species that make up a community, we all intuitively recognise that the plant community present in a hay meadow is very different to that found in a wood or in a bog or on sand dunes by the seaside. The new handbook lists and classifies all of these communities in one slim volume.
One great advantage of having the new handbook is that everyone interested in nature now has a user-friendly Irish classification system to refer to.
Vegetation studies can be difficult as vegetation is dynamic; it changes over time: today's abandoned grassland is destined to be tomorrow's scrub or woodland. Furthermore, vegetation is often not pure; it is often transitional, or part of a continuum, or a ragbag, hotchpotch mosaic that refuses to be categorised in some tidy, artificial pigeonhole.
For further information and all you want to know about the IVC go to
