MATHEMATICAL REPRESENTATIONS AND MODELS IN PLANT ECOLOGY: RESPONSE TO A NOTE BY R. MEAD.

The article responds to an article by R. Mead in the March 1971 issue of the "Journal of Ecology," which proposes a unified mathematical approach to the analysis of ecological observations. It mentions that Mead has mistakenly interpreted his article as an advocacy of the use of multiple regression analysis for fitting high degree polynomial expressions to such observations. It states that the purpose of a first mathematical representation is to provide an intelligible description of observational data.