Global patterns of vascular plant alpha diversity

Francesco Maria Sabatini (1, 2) , Borja Jiménez-Alfaro (3) , Ute Jandt (1, 3) , Milan Chytrý (4) , Richard Field (5) , Michael Kessler (6) , Jonathan Lenoir (7) , Franziska Schrodt , Susan Wiser (8) , Mohammed Arfin Khan (9) , Fabio Attorre (10) , Luis Cayuela (11) , Michele de Sanctis (12) , Jürgen Dengler (13, 14, 1) , Sylvia Haider (3, 15) , Mohamed Hatim (16) , Adrian Indreica (17) , Florian Jansen (18) , Aníbal Pauchard (19, 20) , Robert Peet (21) , Petr Petřík , Valério Pillar , Brody Sandel , Marco Schmidt , Zhiyao Tang , Peter van Bodegom , Kiril Vassilev , Cyrille Violle , Esteban Alvarez-Davila , Priya Davidar , Jiri Dolezal , Bruno Hérault , Antonio Galán-De-Mera , Jorge Jiménez , Stephan Kambach , Sebastian Kepfer-Rojas , Holger Kreft , Felipe Lezama , Reynaldo Linares-Palomino , Abel Monteagudo Mendoza , Justin N’dja , Oliver Phillips , Gonzalo Rivas-Torres , Petr Sklenář , Karina Speziale , Ben Strohbach , Rodolfo Vásquez Martínez , Hua-Feng Wang , Karsten Wesche , Helge Bruelheide

1 iDiv - German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research
2 MLU - Martin-Luther-Universität Halle Wittenberg
3 Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg
4 MUNI - Masaryk University [Brno]
5 School of Geography, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK
6 University of Zurich
7 EDYSAN - Ecologie et Dynamique des Systèmes Anthropisés - UMR CNRS 7058
8 Manaaki Whenua – Landcare Research [Lincoln]
9 Forestry & Environmental Science, Shahjalal University of Science & Technology, Sylhet, Bangladesh
10 Department of Environmental Biology, Sapienza University of Rome, Piazzale Aldo Moro 5, 00185 Roma, Italy
11 URJC - Universidad Rey Juan Carlos [Madrid]
12 UNIVERSITY OF ROME - University of Rome
13 ZHAW - Zürich University of Applied Sciences
14 University of Bayreuth
15 Georg-August-University = Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
16 Tanta University
17 Transilvania University of Brasov
18 University of Rostock
19 Universidad de Concepción - University of Concepcion [Chile]
20 IEB - Instituto de Ecología y Biodiversidad
21 Department of Biology [Chapel Hill]

Abstract Global patterns of regional (gamma) plant diversity are relatively well known, but whether these patterns hold for local communities, and the dependence on spatial grain, remain controversial. Using data on 170,272 georeferenced local plant assemblages, we created global maps of alpha diversity (local species richness) for vascular plants at three different spatial grains, for forests and non-forests. We show that alpha diversity is consistently high across grains in some regions (for example, Andean-Amazonian foothills), but regional ‘scaling anomalies’ (deviations from the positive correlation) exist elsewhere, particularly in Eurasian temperate forests with disproportionally higher fine-grained richness and many African tropical forests with disproportionally higher coarse-grained richness. The influence of different climatic, topographic and biogeographical variables on alpha diversity also varies across grains. Our multi-grain maps return a nuanced understanding of vascular plant biodiversity patterns that complements classic maps of biodiversity hotspots and will improve predictions of global change effects on biodiversity.

Domaines: Sciences du Vivant [q-bio]; Biologie végétale

Francesco Maria Sabatini, Borja Jiménez-Alfaro, Ute Jandt, Milan Chytrý, Richard Field, et al.. Global patterns of vascular plant alpha diversity. Nature Communications, 2022, 13 (1), pp.4683. ⟨10.1038/s41467-022-32063-z⟩. ⟨hal-03779276⟩