Book Review: Körner C. 1999. Alpine Plant Life: Functional Plant Ecology of High Mountain Ecosystems. 343 Pp. Berlin: Springer–Verlag. £37.50 (Softback).

Numerical ecology is the field of quantitative ecology devoted to the numerical analysis of data, mostly multivariate, with emphasis on community composition data. It is a sub-discipline of ecology, not of statistics or other mathematical discipline. Many of the methods used in numerical ecology have been developed by ecologists, specialists of classification methods, geneticists and other researchers who were facing questions about multivariate data in their fields of study. The field of numerical ecology results from the work of a large number of dedicated scientists who experimented with numerical methods of analysis before and in the computer era. They developed a broad palette of methods of analysis to answer specific ecological questions. The article lists some of the pioneer researchers, as well as the scientists who wrote the first textbooks describing how numerical and statistical analysis of ecological data could and should be done to answer ecological questions and test hypotheses. The field is also indebted to the scientists who developed the many computer packages now available for numerical analysis of ecological data.