Global functional variation in alpine vegetation

International audience; Questions. What are the functional trade-offs of vascular plant species in global alpine ecosystems? How is functional variation related to vegetation zones, climatic groups and biogeographic realms? What is the relative contribution of macroclimate and evolutionary history in shaping the functional variation of alpine plant communities? Location. Global. Methods. We compiled a data set of alpine vegetation with 5,532 geo-referenced plots, 1,933 species and six plant functional traits. We used principal component analysis to quantify functional trade-offs among species and trait probability density to assess the functional dissimilarity of alpine vegetation in differ…

Phylogeny of Salicornioideae (Chenopodiaceae): Diversification, biogeography, and evolutionary trends in leaf and flower morphology

Chenopodiaceae-Salicomioideae (14-16 gen./c. 90 spp.) are distributed worldwide in coastal and inland saline habitats. Most of them are easy to recognize by their succulent-articulated stem with strongly reduced leaves and by flowers aggregated in dense, thick spike-shaped thyrses. ITS and the atpB-rbcL spacer were sequenced for 67 species representing 14 genera of Salicomioideae and analysed with maximum parsimony and maximum likelihood, a fossil-calibrated molecular clock using the penalized likelihood method, and lineage through time plots. The evolution of stem, leaf, and flower morphology was traced using MacClade. Both molecular markers indicate that the monophyletic Salicomioideae or…

Distribution maps of vegetation alliances in Europe

Aim The first comprehensive checklist of European phytosociological alliances, orders and classes (EuroVegChecklist) was published by Mucina et al. (2016, Applied Vegetation Science, 19 (Suppl. 1), 3-264). However, this checklist did not contain detailed information on the distribution of individual vegetation types. Here we provide the first maps of all alliances in Europe. Location Europe, Greenland, Canary Islands, Madeira, Azores, Cyprus and the Caucasus countries. Methods We collected data on the occurrence of phytosociological alliances in European countries and regions from literature and vegetation-plot databases. We interpreted and complemented these data using the expert knowledge…

A formal classification of the Lygeum spartum vegetation of the Mediterranean Region

Aims: We examined all available literature and some unpublished data on the We examined all available literature and some unpublished data on the grasslands dominated by Lygeum spartum from Southern Europe and North Africa to produce a formalised classification of this vegetation and to identify the main factors determining its plant species composition. Location: Mediterranean Basin and Iberian Peninsula. Methods: We used a dataset of 728 releves, which were resampled to reduce unbalanced sampling effort, resulting in a dataset of 568 releves and 846 taxa. We classified the plots by TWINSPAN, interpreted the resulting pools, and used them to develop formal definitions of phytosociological …

Salicornia L. (Amaranthaceae) in South Africa and Namibia: rapid spread and ecological diversification of cryptic species

In Salicornia, morphology does not provide reliable diagnostic characters supporting the true extent of evolutionary divergence in the genus, and species concepts have been challenged by molecular analyses. Here, we report the results of an analysis of 91 accessions of the S. meyeriana complex from South Africa and Namibia using the measurements of 38 morphological traits and external transcribed spacer (ETS) sequence data. Morphological data were analysed using discriminant analysis, principal coordinate analysis and nonmetric multidimensional scaling. Phylogenetic divergence was compared with the geographical and ecological diversity of the sampled populations. Tree topology corresponds t…

Phylogeny and ecological diversification of South African Sarcocornia (Chenopodiaceae)

Revision of Sarcocornia (Chenopodiaceae) in South Africa, Namibia and Mozambique

Abstract Sarcocornia comprises ca. 20–24 perennial, halophytic herb and shrub species. The genus is distinct from other genera in the Salicornioideae in having flowers that are more or less equal in size, arranged in a row, and with seeds that have a membranous hairy testa and lack perisperm. Sarcocornia is distributed worldwide, mainly in regions characterized by warm-temperate and, to a lesser extent, subtropical climates. The representatives of this genus are found in habitats such as estuarine salt marshes, tidal mud flats, coastal cliffs, inland salt pans, and salt-laden alluvia of intermittent semi-desert and desert streams. Some South African taxa also occur in inland (semi-desert) q…

A taxonomic nightmare comes true: phylogeny and biogeography of glassworts (Salicornia L., Chenopodiaceae)

In this study we analysed ETS sequence data of 164 accessions belonging to 31 taxa of Salicornia, a widespread, hygrohalophytic genus of succulent, annual herbs of Chenopodiaceae subfam. Salicornioideae, to investigate phylogenetic and biogeographical patterns and hypothesise about the processes that shaped them. Furthermore, our aim was to understand the reasons for the notorious taxonomic difficulties in Salicornia. Salicornia probably originated during the Miocene somewhere between the Mediterranean and Central Asia from within the perennial Sarcocornia and started to diversify during Late Pliocene/Early Pleistocene. The climatic deterioration and landscape-evolution caused by orogenetic…

sPlotOpen – An environmentally balanced, open‐access, global dataset of vegetation plots

Datos disponibles en https://github.com/fmsabatini/sPlotOpen_Code

Temperature and pH define the realised niche space of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi

Made available in DSpace on 2021-06-25T11:52:41Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2021-03-04 European Regional Development Fund (Centre of Excellence EcolChange) University of Tartu (Estonian Research Council ) Moscow State University Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Discovery Grant Russian Science Foundation Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP) Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsradet) The arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi are a globally distributed group of soil organisms that play critical roles in ecosystem function. However, the ecological niches of individual AM fungal taxa are poorly understood. We collected > 300 s…

EUNIS Habitat Classification: Expert system, characteristic species combinations and distribution maps of European habitats

Aim The EUNIS Habitat Classification is a widely used reference framework for European habitat types (habitats), but it lacks formal definitions of individual habitats that would enable their unequivocal identification. Our goal was to develop a tool for assigning vegetation-plot records to the habitats of the EUNIS system, use it to classify a European vegetation-plot database, and compile statistically-derived characteristic species combinations and distribution maps for these habitats. Location Europe. Methods We developed the classification expert system EUNIS-ESy, which contains definitions of individual EUNIS habitats based on their species composition and geographic location. Each ha…