Recent Literature

Nature Sanctuaries in the United States and Canada, a Preliminary Inventory.S. Charles Kendeigh et al.Living Wilderness, 15 (35): 1-45.Winter, 1950-51.$0.50.--An entire issue of the quarterly magazine published by the Wilderness Society (1840 Mintwood Place, Washington 9, D.C.) is devoted to this list of 691 nature sanctuaries in the United States, Canada, and Alaska.It is the fruit of long labor, spanning 12 years, by the Committee on the Study of Plant and Animal Communities and principally by its chairman, Dr. S. Charles Kendeigh of the University of Illinois.The objective was to compile a working list of sanctuaries, describe them briefly, and evaluate their suitability for scientific study, the measuring stick being one of degrees of disturbance and the principle being that the less disturbed an area is, the better it is for research (at least in the particular line of community research emphasized by the committee).Numerous persons have cooperated in the compiling job, including over 200 contributors beside the committee of 16 ecologists representing the Ecological Society of America and later the Ecologists' Union (now called the Nature Conservancy).•I'his is actually a second listing, the first having appeared in 1926 in the 'Naturalists' Guide to the Americas,' edited by V. E. Shelforal.Included in the listing are national parks, national monuments, many state parks, some county, city, and private parks, and some university-owned study areas.Areas not listed, with some exceptions in each group, are national and state forests, federal wildlife refuges, and protected watersheds.The list is subdivided according to the major biotic regions or biomes, and the sanctuaries are classified according to the type of terrain and climax vegetation which prevail in them.The classification of natural regions used is that in the text 'Plant Ecology' by Weaver and Clements, modified to harmonize with the views of community ecologists at the University of Illinois.Under each biome heading, subordinate headings of associations are used wherever possible, and then sanctuaries are listed by states, subdivided into those protected and those only partially protected.This system has the obvious advantage of listing sanctuaries with more or less common ecological characteristics under one heading, thus serving as something of an index to conservationists' accomplishments in setting aside samples of each regional community type.One disadvantage is that, at some points, the rigidity and incompleteness of the Clementsian community classification results in some obscuring, if not misleading, features in the placement of sanctuaries.For example, Clements never saw fit to recognize, on the Pacific coast, broad-sclerophyll forest or redwood border associations, and one cannot tell from this listing what sanctuaries contain stands of these communities except if certain species of trees such as madrone or coast live oak are mentioned.Another disadvantage is that the complex distribution of communities in the West leads to such odd tricks of expediency as placing the chaparral region of California under the coniferous forest biome.Thirteen maps, biome by biome, show the location of sanctuaries, with symbols to distinguish those protected from those only partially protected.These maps are an excellent feature of the listing.Although the entry of the locations could only be approximate on such small maps, the eye catches spots that are placed a little too approximately, as that for the University of California which is shown (page 32) where Stanford University exists!The brief introduction brings out many interesting points."The tundra and the communities of the higher Rockies, Cascades, and Sierra Nevada are relatively better 324

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