ENVIRONMENTAL AND FLORISTIC RELATIONSHIPS Many of the floristic
and environmental relationships between the plant communities
have already been outlined in the introduction to the
classification and discussions of the individual types. This
section addresses more systematically both environmental and
floristic patterns. The topographic-elevational relationships,
as they vary around Mount Rainier, will be considered first.
Then the details and adequacy of the classifications will be
examined from the perspectives of similarity, discriminant, and
principal component analyses. The forest patterns at Mount
Rainier are believed to be largely governed by moisture and
temperature gradients (see Fig. 11). Moisture variations appear
important at low elevations, and complex temperature and
snowpack gradients are associated with higher elevations.
Because of the substantial climatic and topographic variability
in different sectors around the Mount Rainier cone, we
constructed a generalized topographic-elevational patter