Marine litter accumulates on sandy beaches and is an important environmental problem, as well as a threat to habitat types that are among the most endangered according to EU legislation. We sampled ...120 random plots (2 × 2 m) in spring 2017 to determine the distribution pattern of beach litter along the zonation of habitat types from sea to the inland.
The most frequent litter items were plastic, polystyrene and glass. A clear increase of litter cover along the sea-inland gradient is evident, and foredunes and pine forests have the highest cover of litter. Almost no litter was present in humid dune slacks. Shoreline and recreational activities are the major source of beach litter, while ocean/waterway activities are more important in the aphytic zone and strandline.
•The amount of litter significantly changes across different sandy beach habitat types.•The cover of litter is highest in foredunes and almost zero in humid dune slacks.•Plastic fragments, drink/food packaging and cigarette butts are the commonest litter items.•Artificial polymer items are by far the most common litter material found on the beach.
Cities represent enviroment for most of Europe's human population. Spatial pattern of cities' environmental as well as socioeconomic features affect plant biodiversity. We analysed a floristic ...mapping dataset of the city of Ljubljana (Slovenia) and asked what affects the spatial differences in the presence of different categories of species: species according to residence time and endangered and thermophilic species. To explain the proportions of these species groups in grid cells, using Generalized Additive Models, we tested the effects of three categories of predictors: i) urban structure, represented by the distance from the city centre, population density, soil sealing, and quality of residential environment index, ii) habitat predictors, represented by habitat diversity and geologic diversity, and iii) environmental conditions, represented by urban heat island (UHI). Species richness decreases with the distance from the city centre and is highest in the cells with intermediate habitat diversity. Number of species is highest within city parts of highest quality of residential environment index and lowest in parts with UHI effect. Proportion of native species is positively related to habitat and geologic diversity. The proportion of archaeophytes is higher where habitats are more diverse and increases with the distance from the city centre. Grid cells with highest proportion of neophytes are located in the most built-up areas and in the city centre, which is positively associated with soil sealing, but negatively with UHI. Thermophilic species are positively associated with soil sealing. Endangered species have uniform distribution pattern and their proportion is negatively associated with distance from the city centre and soil sealing. A grid cell with the highest proportion of endangered species includes two protected areas with wetland habitats. Calculated ecological indicator values show correlation with soil sealing and habitat diversity. Some of the results are in line with well-established patterns from other cities, while others reflect certain specific features of Ljubljana, e.g. forested hills close to the city centre. The identified hotspots of city's plant species richness can serve in the argumentation of future urbanistic planning.
In this study, we explored the potential of the payment-by-results approach in supporting the maintenance of High Nature Value (HNV) grasslands in a typical HNV farming system and Natura 2000 site in ...Slovenia (Europe) with a high share of small farms, fragmented land ownership and long-term process of land abandonment. We tested the applicability of a hypothetical result-based scheme (RBS) for the conservation of dry grasslands and a set of associated plant indicators, and identified key obstacles to its implementation. Based on a statistical analysis of a survey with 263 farmers and a thematic data analysis of 62 farmer interviews and 10 in-depth interviews and focus groups with researchers, public officials and agricultural advisors, we found that a majority of both farmers and experts support the introduction of RBSs. The selected plant indicators were well-known among the local farmers and monitoring of their presence was preferred over the current system, which demands keeping records on the implementation of farming practices. However, although the RBSs seem to be a superior alternative to the current management-based schemes, their introduction might not be enough to ensure HNV farming systems’ successful conservation. Our results indicate a lack of institutional capacity to implement RBSs on a larger scale, particularly in terms of data support and qualified staff in the advisory service and monitoring agencies. Furthermore, experience to date and mistrust among stakeholders indicate a questionable ability and motivation of authorities to develop locally-based, flexible and innovative agri-environmental measures. RBSs alone also do not adequately address some of the root causes for the disappearance of HNV grasslands, particularly: the lack of knowledge regarding the appropriate modern farming system(s) to ensure their sustainable management in line with conservation goals; specific needs of small farmers; and the need for a socially acceptable land policy reform to enable easier access to land. We argue that systematic investment in closing the existing data and research gaps as well as in increasing the capacity of key institutions at the national and local levels are needed, particularly in European regions of high conservation priority. Furthermore, better integration of nature conservation in different rural policies and a holistic developmental approach in (remote) rural areas are necessary to prevent further abandonment of HNV farming and enable the adoption of biodiversity-friendly farming models.
•A result-based scheme for Eastern sub-Mediterranean dry grasslands was developed.•Farmers recognised plant indicators well and most supported introduction of RBSs.•Lack of institutional capacity may hamper large scale implementation of RBSs.•AEMs alone are not enough to reverse the abandonment of HNV farming systems.•RBSs do not seem better suited than existing AEMs to address needs of small farmers.
Ruderal plants are an important component of plant communities that develop on the range of anthropogenically degraded lands. Yet they were highly neglected and not recognised as desirable for ...restoration purposes. The aim of this study was to analyse the potential for using ruderal species in restoration processes and to identify preliminary criteria for species selection that could be included in ecological restoration of degraded man-made habitats under future conditions of increased human disturbance and climate changes. The desirable characteristics of the species depend primarily on the type of habitat to be restored, with plant height, specific leaf area, rooting depth and seed characteristics being the most important traits. The recognised ecosystem services of the species analysed show that the provisioning and regulating services are well represented, particularly erosion control, pollination, phytoremediation and other soil quality improvements. Most of the dominant and diagnostic ruderal species from the man-made habitats of the north-western Balkan Peninsula are sensitive to climate change and their potential distribution range is expected to decrease at the European scale. Higher certain ecological indicator values, as well as values for disturbance severity, frequency and soil disturbance indices were found for species that are expected to increase their range. Ruderal species are becoming increasingly important for restoration purposes, as the focus shifts to the significance of early successional species. The inclusion of ruderal species in the restoration of degraded sites should be based on criteria such as: non-invasiveness, plant traits favourable for colonisation (height, SLA, seed traits, rooting depth), values of ecological and disturbance indices, provision of ecosystem services, and change of distribution range under changing climate conditions.
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•Ruderal species have unrecognised potential for restoring degraded sites.•Ruderals have suitable traits for colonisation and perform ecosystem services.•Climate change will affect the distribution ranges of ruderal species.•Species with expanding ranges have higher values of disturbance indicator values.•Selection of ruderals for restoration should be based on proposed criteria.
(yellow nutsedge) is an alien species that started to spread in arable fields in Slovenia and has already become a noxious weed. In this study we present the spatio-temporal pattern of this invasion ...in Slovenia. Species was first recorded in 1980 and currently two hotspots are evident (Ljubljana Basin and Posočje). Habitat preferences of
and the floristic compostion of invaded plant communities were studied. These communites were compared to similar communities in Slovenia and to so far described vegetation types with dominating
in Europe. Based on these analyses we described new weed association, namely
Alien plant invasions in European woodlands Wagner, Viktoria; Chytrý, Milan; Jiménez-Alfaro, Borja ...
Diversity & distributions,
September 2017, Volume:
23, Issue:
9/10
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Aim: Woodlands make up a third of European territory and carry out important ecosystem functions, yet a comprehensive overview of their invasion by alien plants has never been undertaken across this ...continent. Location: Europe. Methods: We extracted data from 251,740 vegetation plots stored in the recently compiled European Vegetation Archive. After filtering (resulting in 83,396 plots; 39 regions; 1970-2015 time period), we analysed the species pool and frequency of alien vascular plants with respect to geographic origin and life-forms, and the levels of invasion across the European Nature Information System (EUNIS) woodland habitats. Results: We found a total of 386 alien plant species (comprising 7% of all recorded vascular plants). Aliens originating from outside of and from within Europe were almost equally represented in the species pool (192 vs. 181 species) but relative frequency was skewed towards the former group (77% vs. 22%) due, to some extent, to the frequent occurrence of impatiens parviflora (21% frequency among alien plants). Phanerophytes were the most species-rich life-form (148 species) and had the highest representation in terms of relative frequency (39%) among aliens in the dataset Apart from Europe (181 species), North America was the most important source of alien plants (109 species). At the local scale, temperate and boreal softwood riparian woodland (5%) and mire and mountain coniferous woodland (<1%) had the highest and lowest mean relative alien species richness (percentage of alien species per plot), respectively. Main conclusions: Our results indicate that European woodlands are prone to alien plant invasions especially when exposed to disturbance, fragmentation, alien propagule pressure and high soil nutrient levels. Given the persistence of these factors in the landscape, competitive alien plant species with a broad niche, including alien trees and shrubs, are likely to persist and spread further into European woodlands.
Hacquetia is entering 20
year and in editorial we are presenting history of journal in this period, statistics of authors diversity, geographical distribution of published papers and bibliometrics. ...We highlighted fruitfull collaboration with guest editorsc, the most cited articles and presented future goals.
Aim
A fundamental question in macroecology centres around understanding the relationship between species’ local abundance and their distribution in geographical and climatic space (i.e. the ...multi‐dimensional climatic space or climatic niche). Here, we tested three macroecological hypotheses that link local abundance to the following range properties: (a) the abundance–range size relationship, (b) the abundance–range centre relationship and (c) the abundance–suitability relationship.
Location
Europe.
Taxon
Vascular plants.
Methods
Distribution range maps were extracted from the Chorological Database Halle to derive information on the range and niche sizes of 517 European vascular plant species. To estimate local abundance, we assessed samples from 744,513 vegetation plots in the European Vegetation Archive, where local species’ abundance is available as plant cover per plot. We then calculated the ‘centrality’, that is, the distance between the location of the abundance observation and each species’ range centre in geographical and climatic space. The climatic suitability of plot locations was estimated using coarse‐grain species distribution models (SDMs). The relationships between centrality or climatic suitability with abundance was tested using linear models and quantile regression. We summarized the overall trend across species’ regression slopes from linear models and quantile regression using a meta‐analytical approach.
Results
We did not detect any positive relationships between a species’ mean local abundance and the size of its geographical range or climatic niche. Contrasting yet significant correlations were detected between abundance and centrality or climatic suitability among species.
Main conclusions
Our results do not provide unequivocal support for any of the relationships tested, demonstrating that determining properties of species’ distributions at large grains and extents might be of limited use for predicting local abundance, including current SDM approaches. We conclude that environmental factors influencing individual performance and local abundance are likely to differ from those factors driving plant species’ distribution at coarse resolution and broad geographical extents.
Aims
Vegetation‐plot records provide information on the presence and cover or abundance of plants co‐occurring in the same community. Vegetation‐plot data are spread across research groups, ...environmental agencies and biodiversity research centers and, thus, are rarely accessible at continental or global scales. Here we present the sPlot database, which collates vegetation plots worldwide to allow for the exploration of global patterns in taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic diversity at the plant community level.
Results
sPlot version 2.1 contains records from 1,121,244 vegetation plots, which comprise 23,586,216 records of plant species and their relative cover or abundance in plots collected worldwide between 1885 and 2015. We complemented the information for each plot by retrieving climate and soil conditions and the biogeographic context (e.g., biomes) from external sources, and by calculating community‐weighted means and variances of traits using gap‐filled data from the global plant trait database TRY. Moreover, we created a phylogenetic tree for 50,167 out of the 54,519 species identified in the plots. We present the first maps of global patterns of community richness and community‐weighted means of key traits.
Conclusions
The availability of vegetation plot data in sPlot offers new avenues for vegetation analysis at the global scale.
We describe sPlot, the first global vegetation‐plot database, containing 1,121,244 plots with plant species lists combined with traits from the TRY database and a global phylogeny. The potential of sPlot is illustrated with the first maps of global patterns of community richness and community‐weighted means of key traits. Rules for data usage, expected impact and limitations of sPlot are discussed.
Motivation
Assessing biodiversity status and trends in plant communities is critical for understanding, quantifying and predicting the effects of global change on ecosystems. Vegetation plots record ...the occurrence or abundance of all plant species co‐occurring within delimited local areas. This allows species absences to be inferred, information seldom provided by existing global plant datasets. Although many vegetation plots have been recorded, most are not available to the global research community. A recent initiative, called ‘sPlot’, compiled the first global vegetation plot database, and continues to grow and curate it. The sPlot database, however, is extremely unbalanced spatially and environmentally, and is not open‐access. Here, we address both these issues by (a) resampling the vegetation plots using several environmental variables as sampling strata and (b) securing permission from data holders of 105 local‐to‐regional datasets to openly release data. We thus present sPlotOpen, the largest open‐access dataset of vegetation plots ever released. sPlotOpen can be used to explore global diversity at the plant community level, as ground truth data in remote sensing applications, or as a baseline for biodiversity monitoring.
Main types of variable contained
Vegetation plots (n = 95,104) recording cover or abundance of naturally co‐occurring vascular plant species within delimited areas. sPlotOpen contains three partially overlapping resampled datasets (c. 50,000 plots each), to be used as replicates in global analyses. Besides geographical location, date, plot size, biome, elevation, slope, aspect, vegetation type, naturalness, coverage of various vegetation layers, and source dataset, plot‐level data also include community‐weighted means and variances of 18 plant functional traits from the TRY Plant Trait Database.
Spatial location and grain
Global, 0.01–40,000 m².
Time period and grain
1888–2015, recording dates.
Major taxa and level of measurement
42,677 vascular plant taxa, plot‐level records.
Software format
Three main matrices (.csv), relationally linked.
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