Category: Behind the paper

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

Posted on July 7, 2021July 7, 2021 by David Zeleny

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.…

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

Posted on June 22, 2021June 22, 2021 by David Zeleny

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.…

A big data approach for detecting macroscale vegetation patterns

Posted on May 28, 2021June 20, 2021 by David Zeleny

The post provided by Buntarou Kusumoto & Yasuhiro Kubota

Vegetation survey on a computer. Credit: Buntarou Kusumoto.

This Behind the paper post refers to the article Community dissimilarity of angiosperm trees reveals deep-time diversification across tropical and temperate forests by Kusumoto et al.…

Monitoring a riverside forest with students and community scientists

Posted on April 19, 2021May 28, 2021 by David Zeleny

The post provided by Kelly Steinberg

Students gather to share and record data they collected during a monthly trip to their field site in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA. Their data includes groundwater depth, leaf litter and precipitation in the riparian cottonwood-willow forest that runs through the city, only a few minutes bus ride from school.

An introduction to human impact indicators

Posted on March 21, 2021March 28, 2021 by David Zeleny

The post provided by Jack Zinnen, Jeffrey W. Matthews & Greg Spyreas

The areas in North America (left) and Europe (right) where the three human impact indicator values are used. Adapted from Fig. 1 in the paper (Zinnen et al. 2021).

Broad-scale classification of Mediterranean lowland to submontane pine forest vegetation relies on forest structure for high ranks

Posted on February 17, 2021February 17, 2021 by David Zeleny

The post provided by Gianmaria Bonari

*Pinus brutia* forest understory in the surroundings of Yamanlar, Turkey, 2019. Photo credit Milan Chytrý.

This Behind the paper post refers to the article Classification of the Mediterranean lowland to submontane pine forest vegetation by Gianmaria Bonari and colleagues, published in Applied Vegetation Science (https://doi.org/10.1111/avsc.12544…

How does the Kalahari vegetation response to seasonal climate and herbivory?

Posted on November 4, 2020November 4, 2020 by David Zeleny

The post provided by Ute Schmiedel

One of our permanent plots in the Kalahari, South Africa, at the peak of the growing season during an average rainfall season (2013) and after several years of very low rainfall (2015). The grazing herbivores removed most of the grass biomass and provided vegetation gaps for the new plants to grow.

The ecological filters in restoration practice

Posted on October 19, 2020October 19, 2020 by David Zeleny

The post provided by Paweł Waryszak

Paweł Waryszak, the main author of this study, records seedlings emergence on restoration study site after topsoil transfer. Photo credit: William Fowler.

This post refers to the article Best served deep: the seedbank from salvaged topsoil underscores the role of the dispersal filter in restoration practice by Waryszak et al.…

Drivers of biodiversity depend on spatial grain and plant group: new paper from the EDGG Field Workshop to Bulgarian dry grasslands

Posted on October 9, 2020October 9, 2020 by David Zeleny

Prepared by Jürgen Dengler & Iwona Dembicz

A thorough sampling of an “EDGG Biodiversity Plot” is a time-consuming and almost meditative procedure. Photo credit: Jürgen Dengler.

This Behind the paper post refers to the article by Dembicz et al. Drivers of plant diversity in Bulgarian dry grasslands vary across spatial scales and functional-taxonomic groups, published in the Journal of Vegetation Science (https://doi.org/10.1111/jvs.12935…