INTRODUCTION TO MARITIME CLIFF COMMUNITIES

Summary

The sampling of maritime cliff vegetation

Apart from along the eastern shores of England, from Flamborough Head south to the Thames estuary, steep rocky cliffs figure prominently around much of our coastline, splashed by spray to varying degrees, home to colonial sea-birds and often providing grazing for coastal farms. Yet, until relatively recently, the distinctive plant communities they support, often disposed in striking zonations related to maritime influence, the geology and soils and the influence of stock and wild herbivores, had attracted little attention, at least on a large scale. Thus, they have usually figured only in local studies, often as part of descriptions of both coastal and inland vegetation of particular sites (e.g. Petch 1933, Poore & Robertson 1949, Goodman & Gillham 1954, Gillham 1953, McVean 1961 a, Coombe 1961, Birks 1973) or, when surveyed more widely, have been described in relation to broadly-defined habitat groups (Goldsmith 1975).

We were therefore especially fortunate in this project to have the benefit of a detailed phytosociological study of sea-cliff vegetation from all around the coast of Britain carried out by Andrew Malloch of Lancaster University and building on his earlier survey of the Lizard and other parts of Cornwall (Malloch 1970, 1971, 1972). As with the general approach we adopted for this project, Malloch had located samples only on the basis of floristic and structural homogeneity of the vegetation, had used an identical range of quadrat sizes and had recorded species composition using the Domin scale of cover/abundance.