Classification of grasslands and other open vegetation types in the Palaearctic – Introduction to the Special Collection

By

Nowak, Arkadiusz
Biurrun, Idoia
Janišová, Monika
Dengler, Jürgen

Type

Article

Date of Publication

2022-7-22

Original Publication

Vegetation classification and survey

Volume

3

Pages

149--159

Subjects

Africa , Asia , Beta diversity , grassland , open vegetation , Palaearctic , Phytosociology , spring vegetation , Syntaxonomy , tall-herb vegetation , Vegetation classification , vegetation-plot database

Contributed by

Pensoft Publishers

Language

English

Published by

Sofia Pensoft Publishers 2020-

Identifiers

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3897/VCS.87068

 

Abstract

With this editorial, we introduce the Special Collection “Classification of grasslands and other open vegetation types in the Palaearctic”. In searching the Web of Science for classification papers on Palaearctic grasslands, we found 207 studies from 1972–2021, including 106 typical classification works. These studies originated mainly from Europe, with only few from Asia and only one from Northern Africa. While Europe in the 20th century already had a strong tradition in regional classification studies, the launch of a common plot database (European Vegetation Archive, EVA) and a continental syntaxonomic reference list (EuroVegChecklist) have spurred the developments there in recent years. We then introduce the seven articles of the Special Collection. Four of them present regional studies of certain vegetation types, namely spring vegetation (Montio-Cardaminetea) in Grisons, Switzerland, dry grasslands (Festuco-Brometea) of the inneralpine valleys of Austria, montane to subalpine tall-herb vegetation (Mulgedio-Aconitetea) in the Sudetes Mts., Poland, and steppe depressions (Festuco-Brometea and Molinio-Arrhentatheretea) in Southern Ukraine. A new synthesis of the grassland vegetation of Navarre in Spain (all classes, focus on Festuco-Brometea), started with an unsupervised classification and translated it into a hierarchical expert system, while another study provided the first synthesis of the tall-herb vegetation (mainly Ulopteretea prangae) of Tajikistan. Finally, a study based on the GrassPlot database compared fine-grain beta-diversities across open vegetation types of the Palaearctic.<br> Abbreviations: EDGG = Eurasian Dry Grassland Group, EVA = European Vegetation Archive, IAVS = International Association for Vegetation Science, WoS = Web of Science.