Category: Behind the paper

The merits of studying oceanic island floras in a team of early career researchers

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The post is provided by Dagmar Martina Hanz

View of the Tabaibal-Cardonal vegetation zone with focus on a dragon tree (Dracaena draco) near El Palmar on La Palma, Canary Islands (Photo credit: Dagmar Hanz).

This post refers to the article “High species turnover and low intraspecific trait variation in endemic and non-endemic plant species assemblages on an oceanic island” by Hanz et al.,…

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Translating a semi-supervised classification into a hierarchical expert system: Navarran grasslands demonstrate a way forward in classification approaches

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The post provided by Idoia Biurrun & Jürgen Dengler

View of Beriain mountain, central Navarre (Spain). On the foreground participants in the Field Workshop walking along a stand of Potentillo-Brachypodion pinnati (Brachypodietalia pinnati, Festuco-Brometea) (Photo credit: Monika Janišová).
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What’s up, vegetation science? Thinking about the future challenges and opportunities for vegetation science from the perspective of early-career researchers

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Prepared by Jonas J. Lembrechts, Florencia Yannelli and Marta Gaia Sperandii

Word cloud of the recurring topics coming out of our horizon scan for vegetation science. Along with “Vegetation”, terms like the “monitoring” of “change”, “dynamics” and “climate” pop out big, highlighting how vegetation science will increasingly have to move from what vegetation is and how it can be conserved to what vegetation can be and can become in a rapidly changing world.
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Range of variation in wetland vegetation on a subcontinental scale in Southern Africa

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The post provided by Erwin Sieben

Sampling a wetland near Port St. Johns along the Eastern Cape coastline, South Africa (Photo credit: Erwin Sieben).

This Behind the paper post refers to the article Components of plant species diversity along environmental gradients at various spatial scales in wetland environments of southern Africa by Erwin Sieben et al.…

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Traditional cattle grazing can maintain functional diversity of oriental beech forests

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The post provided by Zahed Shakeri, Daniel Simberloff, Markus Bernhardt-Römermann and Rolf Lutz Eckstein

Cows resting in a summer camp at an altitude of about 2300 meters in Talish, Iran. Photo credit: Mohammad Aminpour.

This post refers to the article The impact of livestock grazing and canopy gaps on species pool and functional diversity of ground flora in the Caspian beech forests of Iran by Shakeri et al.,…

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GrassPlot marathon: the long way towards the first benchmarks of plant species richness of Palaearctic grasslands

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The post provided by Idoia Biurrun, Iwona Dembicz, Jürgen Dengler and Remigiusz Pielech

Nested-plot sampling in an alpine grassland (Elyno-Seslerietea) in Grisons (Switzerland) (Photo credit: Jürgen Dengler)

This post refers to the article Benchmarking plant diversity of Palaearctic grasslands and other open habitats by Biurrun et al.…

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New insights into small-scale species-area relationships and beta diversity due to the GrassPlot database

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The post provided by Jürgen Dengler, Iwona Dembicz, Jinghui Zhang & Idoia Biurrun

Sampling of a nested plot in a meso-xeric grassland in Northern Spain (Photo credit: Juan Antonio Campos).

This post refers to the articles “Fine-grain beta diversity of Palaearctic grassland vegetation” by Dembicz et al.…

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ausplotsR: A new R package to download and analyse vegetation and soil data collected by Australia’s most comprehensive ecosystem monitoring program

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This post was provided by Samantha Munroe

TERN monitoring plot locations as generated within the ausplotsR package coded by percent fractional green cover. Image credit: Munroe et al. (2021).

This Behind the paper post refers to the article “ausplotsR: An R package for rapid extraction and analysis of vegetation and soil data collected by Australia’s Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network” by Samantha Munroe et al.…

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