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APPLICATION OF SOME 



PHYTOSOCIOLOGICAL TECHNIQUES 



TO BRAZILIAN RAIN FOREST^ 



Stanley A. Cain, Gustavus M. de Oliveira Castro, J. Murga Pires, 

 and Nilo Tomds da Silva 



PART I. FOREST COMPOSITION OF ARAPARI ISLAND, PARA - 



Although taxonomic studies of the woody flora of the Amazonian rain 

 forest have made known a considerable portion of the thousands of species,^ 

 there have been very few studies of the composition and structure of the 



1 At the time of these studies the senior author was a member of the United 

 Nations Technical Assistance Mission to Brazil employed by UNESCO as Expert in 

 Ecology. After his initial project had been carried as far as possible an arrangement 

 was made between UNESCO, the Servigo Nacional de Malaria, and the Conselho 

 Na clonal de Pesquisas for work on a Manual of Vegetation Analysis to be prepared 

 by Doctors Cain and de Oliveira Castro. In connection with this project, field work 

 was done in the Territory of Amapa and the states of Para, Minas Gerais, Parana, 

 Rio Grande do Sul, and the Federal District. The present paper is in a sense a 

 by-product of this field work, in which we attempted the application to tropical 

 vegetation of phytosociological concepts and methods originated in studies of 

 temperate vegetation. 



The senior author of this paper had accepted the invitation of the Editor of the 

 American Journal of Botany to prepare a review of recent advances in phytosociol- 

 ogy. Time did not permit fulfillment, so this original work was offered in its place. 

 The studies are presented in three parts with designation of specific authorship at 

 the appropriate points. Deep appreciation of the cordial cooperation of Brazilian 

 scientists and their institutions is a pleasure to express. 



- Gustavus M. de Oliveira Castro, Stanley A. Cain, and Nilo Tomas da Silva. 



^ For example, for one family alone, Ducke and Black (1953) state that 846 

 species of Leguminosae are known from the Amazon region, with 206 species known 

 from the neighborhood of Belem, Para. 



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