Preface and Acknowledgements

Summary

With the appearance of this, the third of the five volumes of British Plant Communities, we are well past the halfway mark in the publication of the results of the National Vegetation Classification. Again, as coordinator of the project and editor of these books, it is my pleasure to record my own personal thanks to my colleagues John Birks, Andrew Malloch, Michael Proctor, David Shimwell, Jacqui Huntley, Elaine Radford, Martin Wigginton, Paul Wilkins and the co-chairmen of the research team, Donald Pigott and Derek Ratcliffe, for their sustained industry and inspiration; and to mark our gratitude to all those who contributed to the accounts of grassland and montane communities presented here.

As far as the mesotrophic grasslands were concerned, we were helped greatly by the happy concurrence with the project of Dr Martin Page's research at Exeter University. As well as providing us with large amounts of data, Martin undertook to provide preliminary accounts of the vegetation types he had defined from his samples and ours, and gave unstintingly of his expertise as I integrated his results with the rest of our work. We were also fortunate to have access to data from Dr Richard Jones, and from Dr Tim Bines and his team in the then Nature Conservancy Council England Field Unit, Drs Martin Alcock, Kevin Charman and Peter Welsh.

From the beginning, too, we were much encouraged and assisted by Mr Derek Wells, then of the NCC Chief Scientist Directorate, whose long experience of lowland grasslands informed both our sampling programme and the interpretation of results. In completing the community accounts, I have also benefited in many ways from discussions with his successor, Dr John Hopkins, and with Drs Paul Adam, James Grieg, Tony Hare, Alison McDonald, Caroline Sargeant, Michelina Skeffington, Bryan Wheeler, Miss Katherine Hearn and Messrs Johnny Stone and Ian Taylor.

With calcicolous grasslands, we were also fortunate in having the ready cooperation of many others. Among our own team, of course, David Shimwell had a wide knowledge of these vegetation types and much existing data, and these were complemented by very numerous samples from southern Britain collected by and under the guidance of Mr Terry Wells of the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology, and converted into compatible computerised data by Dr Brian Huntley, working with John Birks and Jacqui Huntley at Cambridge.