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…
Distance decay 2.0 – a global synthesis of taxonomic and functional turnover in ecological communities
AbstractUnderstanding the variation in community composition and species abundances, i.e., β-diversity, is at the heart of community ecology. A common approach to examine β-diversity is to evaluate directional turnover in community composition by measuring the decay in the similarity among pairs of communities along spatial or environmental distances. We provide the first global synthesis of taxonomic and functional distance decay along spatial and environmental distance by analysing 149 datasets comprising different types of organisms and environments. We modelled an exponential distance decay for each dataset using generalized linear models and extracted r2 and slope to analyse the streng…
Global patterns and drivers of alpine plant species richness
B.J.-A. was funded by the Marie Curie Clarín-COFUND program of the Principality of Asturias-EU (ACB17-26) and the Spanish Research Agency (AEI/10.13039/501100011033).
Distance decay 2.0. A global synthesis of taxonomic and functional turnover in ecological communities
Caio Graco-Roza was funded by the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES), the Carlos Chagas Filho Research Support Foundation (FAPERJ) and the Ella and Georg Erhnrooth Foundation; Jan Altman by research grants INTER-EXCELLENCE LTAUSA19137 provided by Czech Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports, 20-05840Y of the Czech Science Foundation, and long-term research development project no. RVO 67985939 of the Czech Academy of Sciences; Otso Ovaskainen was funded by Academy of Finland (grant no. 309581), Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation, Research Council of Norway through its Centres of Excellence Funding Scheme (223257), and the European Research Council (ERC) unde…
sPlotOpen – An environmentally balanced, open‐access, global dataset of vegetation plots
Datos disponibles en https://github.com/fmsabatini/sPlotOpen_Code
One taxon does not fit all: Herb-layer diversity and stand structural complexity are weak predictors of biodiversity in Fagus sylvatica forests
Abstract Since adequate information on the distribution of biodiversity is hardly achievable, biodiversity indicators are necessary to support the management of ecosystems. These surrogates assume that either some habitat features, or the biodiversity patterns observed in a well-known taxon, can be used as a proxy of the diversity of one or more target taxa. Nevertheless, at least for certain taxa, the validity of this assumption has not yet been sufficiently demonstrated. We investigated the effectiveness of both a habitat- and a taxa-based surrogate in six European beech forests in the Apennines. Particularly, we tested: (1) whether the stand structural complexity and the herb-layer speci…
Plot - A new tool for global vegetation analyses
23Biodiversity Conservation Department, ISPRA – Italian National Institute for Environmental Protection and Research, Rome, Italy