An island, a classification, and a handful of botanists

The post provided by Riccardo Guarino, Thomas Becker, Iwona Dembicz & Jürgen Dengler

This post refers to the article Dry grasslands of Sicily: Multi-taxon diversity and classification challenges by Guarino et al., published in Vegetation Classification and Survey (https://doi.org/10.3897/VCS.175402)

Long before any field workshop, before any grant application and academic unfairness, before any politely worded review that praises the dataset while questioning the premises, there was a man standing on a slope of sunburnt clay, wondering whether vegetation really wished to be classified at all.

That man knew (though he rarely said it aloud) that vegetation classification is an act of faith disguised as method. Like all faiths, it requires ritual (the plot, the relevé, the cover estimate), a shared language (alliances, orders, classes), officiants (distinguished professors), and a community small enough to agree without ever fully agreeing. He also knew, with a lucidity bordering on pessimism, that this faith is always betrayed by arithmetic: too few observers, too many species, too much heterogeneity compressed into too small a square of ground. Even if Sicily was overrun by phytosociologists, the resulting map would still be a pale approximation of what the vegetation actually is: a shimmering, restless negotiation among climate, soil, disturbance, chance, and time. These ideas would later harden into equations and arguments, written with some disenchantment in a paper about classification efficiency and sustainable compromise (Guarino et al., 2022).

But in 2012, there was still considerable unease. Unease, however, can be productive. Schopenhauer would have called it the friction between Will and Representation; Calvino might have imagined it as a labyrinth of syntaxonomic schemes; a vegetation ecologist would simply recognize it as the moment when field reality refuses to align with inherited categories. In Sicily, this moment occurs often. Annuals and perennials intertwine like disputing narratives. Communities appear discrete in full summer, when annuals almost disappear, and blur by the next spring. The same slope, revisited a year later, tells a different story with the same protagonists.

It was from this discomfort – and not despite it – that the idea emerged to invite outsiders. Not reviewers, not authorities, but colleagues shaped by different landscapes and different traditions: Central and Northern European vegetation ecologists accustomed to recording every detectable species within a plot, mosses and lichens included, trusting that completeness might tame ambiguity. Bringing them to Sicily was an experiment in epistemology: what would Mediterranean vegetation look like through Central European eyes?

Would the preconceptual separation into separate sampling units, Lygeo-Stipetea versus Stipo-Trachynietea, Ammophilion versus Alkanno-Maresion nanae, survive such scrutiny? Or would they collapse into something less Manichean, but perhaps more honest?

Thus, the fourth EDGG Field Workshop was organized, quietly radical in its intent (Guarino et al. 2012). The island became a laboratory of perspectives. On coastal sands, inland clays, volcanic substrates, and evaporitic hills, small squares of ground were subjected to a level of attention usually reserved for more anthropocentric (eco?) systems. Every terricolous autotrophic organism was invited to the census. The plots filled with names, then with doubts, then with discussions that were sometimes technical, sometimes philosophical, in a distinctly Pirandellian sense: Which community is this? And who am I to decide?

The reader knows how this story ends, because it has already been written several times. The analyses would show higher diversity than expected, blurred boundaries where syntaxonomical schemes promised clarity, and clusters that made ecological sense without offering metaphysical comfort. The separation between annual and perennial grasslands, so carefully defended in Mediterranean sampling tradition, would refuse to emerge cleanly when confronted with comprehensive data. The resulting paper, gestated over years of reflection and discussion, would eventually articulate these tensions with composure (hopefully…), acknowledging both the power and the limits of any classification.

And yet, the true outcome of the 4^th EDGG Field Workshop was not a dendrogram or a table of diagnostic species. It was the confirmation of a long-harboured suspicion: that objectivity in vegetation science is not a destination, but a direction. One walks toward it, knowing it will never be reached, much like the horizon across Sicilian hills. The value lies in the walking, in the shared protocols, the disagreements conducted in good faith, and the willingness to see one’s own landscape through new eyes.

From the outside, the decision to organize an international field workshop might appear strategic, even confident. In truth, it is an existential gesture: a way of saying that if classification is inevitably subjective, then the only ethical response is to multiply viewpoints; if approximation is unavoidable, then one must at least approximate together. Vegetation, after all, does not care how it is classified. But vegetation ecologists do. And in that caring, temporally limited, often contested, and persistently unfinished, lies both the burden and the dignity of their work.

If you wish to know how the author team, 13 years after the field sampling, combined their contrasting viewpoints into a joint perspective, please visit our paper (Guarino et al. 2025). If you are interested in the EDGG Field Workshops, you can find information on the EDGG webpage at https://edgg.org/fw/overview. More details about sampling methodology are available in Dengler et al. (2016). To understand how the Field Workshops in general contribute to the understanding of the diversity patterns of Palaearctic open habitats, you might visit the GrassPlot Diversity Explorer (https://edgg.org/databases/GrasslandDiversityExplorer; see also Biurrun et al. 2021). There have been 21 EDGG Field Workshops since the first event in Transylvania in 2009 (Dengler et al. 2012). They often give rise to influential papers on biodiversity patterns (e.g., Turtureanu et al. 2014; Cancellieri et al. 2024) and syntaxonomy (e.g., García-Mijangos et al. 2021; Vynokurov et al. 2024). In 2025, there were two great Field Workshops, one in the Maritime and Ligurian Alps of Italy and one in the Turku Archipelago of Finland (Miskova et al. 2025). In 2026, there will again be one or two Field Workshops, one in conjunction with the Eurasian Grassland Conference in Bulgaria (Vynokurov et al. 2025), the second still to be discussed. If you are interested in more details, please consult the webpage or contact Jürgen Dengler, the Deputy Field Workshop Coordinator.

References:

• Biurrun, I., Pielech, R., Dembicz, I., Gillet, F., Kozub, L., Marcenò, C., Reitalu, T., Van Meerbeek, K., Guarino, R., (…) & Dengler, J. (2021) Benchmarking plant diversity of Palaearctic grasslands and other open habitats. Journal of Vegetation Science 32: e13050. https://doi.org/10.1111/jvs.13050  
• Cancellieri, L., Sperandii, M.G., Rosati, L., Bellisario, B., Franceschini, C., Aleffi, M., Bartolucci, F., Becker, T., Belonovskaya, E., (…) & Filibeck, G. (2024) Drivers of vascular plant, bryophyte and lichen richness in grasslands along a precipitation gradient (central Apennines, Italy). Journal of Vegetation Science 35: e13305. https://doi.org/10.1111/jvs.13305
• Dengler, J., Becker, T., Ruprecht, E., Szabó, A., Becker, U., Beldean, M., Bita-Nicolae, C., Dolnik, C., Goia, I., (…) & Uğurlu, E. (2012): Festuco-Brometea communities of the Transylvanian Plateau (Romania) – a preliminary overview on syntaxonomy, ecology, and biodiversity. Tuexenia 32: 319–359.
• Dengler, J., Boch, S., Filibeck, G., Chiarucci, A., Dembicz, I., Guarino, R., Henneberg, B., Janišová, M., Marcenò, C., (…) & Biurrun, I. 2016. Assessing plant diversity and composition in grasslands across spatial scales: the standardised EDGG sampling methodology. Bulletin of the Eurasian Dry Grassland Group 32: 13−30.
• García-Mijangos, I., Berastegi, A., Biurrun, I., Dembicz, I., Janišová, M., Kuzemko, A., Vynokurov, D., Ambarlı, D., Etayo, J., (…) & Dengler, J. (2021) Grasslands of Navarre (Spain), focusing on the Festuco-Brometea: classification, hierarchical expert system and characterisation. Vegetation Classification and Survey 2: 195–231.
• Guarino, R., Becker, T., Dembicz, I., Dolnik, C., Kącki, Z., Kozub, Ł., Rejžek, M., Dengler, J. (2012) Impressions from the 4th EDGG Research Expedition to Sicily: community composition and diversity of Mediterranean grasslands. Bulletin of the European Dry Grassland Group 15: 12–22.
• Guarino, R., Guccione, M., Gillet, F. (2022) Plant communities, synusiae and the arithmetic of a sustainable classification. Vegetation Classification and Survey 3: 7–13. https://doi.org/10.3897/VCS.60951
• Guarino, R., Becker, T., Dembicz, I., Dolnik, C., Kozub, Ł., Dengler, J. (2025) Dry grasslands of Sicily: Multi-taxon diversity and classification challenges. Vegetation Classification and Survey 6: 301−327. https://doi.org/10.3897/VCS.175402
• Miskova, O., Borovyk, D., Dengler, J., Fahs, N., Mussaari, M., Nikolei, R., Rabyk, I., Skobel, N., Tyshchenko, O., Vynokurov, D. (2025) Diversity of grasslands and other open habitats in the Turku Archipelago, Finland: Impressions from the 21st EDGG Field Workshop, 28 June to 6 July 2025. Palaearctic Grasslands 65: 36-51. https://doi.org/10.21570/EDGG.PG.65.36-51
• Turtureanu, P.D., Todorova, S., Becker, T., Dolnik, C., Ruprecht, E., Sutcliffe, L.M.E., Szabó, A. & Dengler, J. 2014. Scale- and taxon-dependent biodiversity patterns of dry grassland vegetation in Transylvania (Romania). Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 182: 15–24.
• Vynokurov, D., Aleksanyan, A., Becker, T., Biurrun, I. Borovyk, D., Fayvush, G., García-Mijangos, I., Magnes, M., Palpurina, S., (…) & Dengler, J. (2024) Dry grasslands and thorn-cushion communities of Armenia: a first syntaxonomic classification. Vegetation Classification and Survey 5: 39–73. https://doi.org/10.3897/VCS.119253
• Vynokurov, D., Dengler, J., Vassilev, K., Velev, N. (2025) Announcement of the 22nd EDGG Field Workshop – Pirin Mountains, Bulgaria, 14-18 July 2026. Palaearctic Grasslands 65: 14-15.

Brief personal summary of the authors:

Riccardo Guarino is a professor of Environmental and Applied Botany at the University of Palermo. As a vegetation ecologist, he has been involved in many projects focused on biodiversity assessment and monitoring, environmental sustainability, and urban green infrastructure based on nature-oriented principles. He is an enthusiastic participant of EDGG Field Workshops, having attended 10 of them, because they are great opportunities to explore climate- and land use driven changes on vegetation structure, composition, and functioning. As a science communicator, he promotes awareness and knowledge of plant biodiversity through conferences, publications, and field-based activities.

Thomas Becker is a vegetation ecologist at Trier University, Germany. He is both an enthusiastic field researcher and a dedicated data analyst and has participated in 10 EDGG Field Workshops. He considers the EDGG Field Workshops a wonderful opportunity to gain insight into the impressive diversity of grasslands across the Palearctic realm and to explore them together with equally passionate colleagues from many different countries. The main driving force behind his research is the preservation of the fascinating diversity of nature, both for its own sake and for humanity.

Iwona Dembicz is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Environmental Biology in the Faculty of Biology, University of Warsaw, Poland. Her interests as vegetation ecologist cover a wide range of ecosystems, but particularly grasslands and their biodiversity patterns, ecosystem functioning and conservation. Having previously participated in field workshops organised by the Eurasian Dry Grassland Group, she joined the founding group of GrassPlot, an EDGG-affiliated database of multi-scale plant diversity in Palaearctic grasslands.

Jürgen Dengler is a Professor of Vegetation Ecology at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) in Wädenswil, Switzerland. He is a co-founder of EDGG and the “inventor” of the EDGG Field Workshops. He attended all Field Workshops except one and finds them a wonderful opportunity to study Palaearctic vegetation in beautiful landscapes very much in detail together with equally passionate colleagues from various countries. At the same time these events generate invaluable data that can be, and are, used for analysing biodiversity patterns and their underlying drivers as well as to develop consistent classification systems, two of the main academic interests of Jürgen, next to vegetation change studies.