The arrangement of vegetation over the landscape is a product of interactions between the environment, the ecological characteristics of individual organisms, barriers, dispersal potential, epidemic disease, anthropogenic influences, and the partially serendipitous factor of propagule availability. Within the complex of environmental factors, several are of special importance in tracing the history of North American plant communities. They include climate; plate tectonics as a mechanism for orogeny, volcanism, land bridges, and terranes; and catastrophes. Each have numerous interacting subcomponents, feedbacks, and amplifiers, and although constraints of format make it necessary to discuss these separately and sequentially, they are interconnected and pertubation of one affects the entire system. Diagrams summarizing these factors are presented at the end of the following sections. The diagrams are not intended as models for, indeed, the single factor of climate could be expanded into a component so vastly complex that it would be counterproductive to a general summary. Similarly, the hydrological cycle, which involves the largest movement of any substance on Earth, cannot be fully treated because a “systems” view of its role in influencing climate is not available (Chahine, 1992) and the roles of water vapor (a greenhouse gas) and cloud cover are just now being quantified (Cess et al., 1995; Ramanathan et al., 1995). Rather, the diagrams illustrate some of the factors and relationships discussed in the text and serve as a reminder of the complex interactive nature of physical and biotic events. Plants are limited in their ecological amplitude. Several important corollaries follow from this observation; one of the most fundamental is that changes in climate cause extinctions promote evolution, and alter the range and habitats of organisms. Because climate plays a central role in the arrangement of modern communities (Gates, 1993; Kareiva et al., 1993; Woodward, 1987) and in the development and distribution of past assemblages (Brenchley, 1984; Crowley and North, 1991; Hecht, 1985a), reference to some elements of general climatology is necessary for understanding the diversification, radiation, and reshuffling of North American paleocommunities during the Late Cretaceous and Cenozoic.
Dynamics of the relief and sesmotectonic activity of the modern structures in the delta of the river lena