By Frank Landis, CNPS-SD Conservation Committee ChairJust to be different, I thought I’d go back to my roots as a plant community ecologist and explain why I dislike that particular label so much. I will be going into what the words plant community and vegetation mean, and why vegetation community is such an ugly and ill-thought neologism.First, vegetation: it simply means all the plants in a defined area. That’s what Julie Evens (my former lab mate and now CNPS Fellow) maps for CNPS, and I’m glad she does. Plant community also means all the plants in an area, but it comes attached to a rather problematic and disproved theory that I will describe below.The third term I will add is ecosystem, which means all the organisms in a particular area, plus their abiotic environment. This may seem to be a non-sequitur, but if this is new to you,you’re probably going to raise one of some very commonobjections. Most of those objections actually refer to ecosystems, not plant communities. Please keep this in mind. Plant community and vegetation refer only to plants.