Category: Behind the paper

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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Monitoring a riverside forest with students and community scientists

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

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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…

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

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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.
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The ecological filters in restoration practice

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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.…

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