Disturbance indicator values for European plants

Abstract

Motivation Indicator values are numerical values used to characterize the ecological niches of species and to estimate their occurrence along gradients. Indicator values on climatic and edaphic niches of plant species have received considerable attention in ecological research, whereas data on the optimal positioning of species along disturbance gradients are less developed. Here, we present a new data set of disturbance indicator values identifying optima along gradients of natural and anthropogenic disturbance for 6382 vascular plant species based on the analysis of 736,366 European vegetation plots and using expert‐based characterization of disturbance regimes in 236 habitat types. The indicator values presented here are crucial for integrating disturbance niche optima into large‐scale vegetation analyses and macroecological studies. Main types of variables contained We set up five main continuous indicator values for European vascular plants: disturbance severity, disturbance frequency, mowing frequency, grazing pressure and soil disturbance. The first two indicators are provided separately for the whole community and for the herb layer. We calculated the values as the average of expert‐based estimates of disturbance values in all habitat types where a species occurs, weighted by the number of plots in which the species occurs within a given habitat type. Spatial location and grain Europe. Vegetation plots ranging in size from 1 to 1000 m2. Time period and grain Vegetation plots mostly sampled between 1956 and 2013 (= 5th and 95th quantiles of the sampling year, respectively). Major taxa and level of measurement Species‐level indicator values for vascular plants. Software format csv file.

Ellenberg‐type indicator values for European vascular plant species

“…Tables of original indicator values for each region and harmonized indicator values for Europe can be downloaded from the Zenodo repository (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7427088), where future updates will also be available. A user‐friendly data set for analyses that combines Ellenberg‐type indicator values developed here with disturbance indicator values for European plants developed by Midolo et al (2023) can be downloaded at https://floraveg.eu/download/. Ellenberg‐type indicator values in a format for the JUICE program (Tichý 2002) are available at https://sci.muni.cz/botany/juice/?idm%3D10.…”

“…Not only vascular plants but later also bryophytes and lichens were characterized by indicator values following the same system (Ellenberg et al, 1992). Similar systems were developed to indicate disturbance (Briemle & Ellenberg, 1994; Herben et al, 2016; Midolo et al, 2023).…”

Ecological Indicator Values for Europe (EIVE) 1.0

“…However, the more than 30 national and regional EIV systems lack consistency in scaling and coding of the ecological indicators, as well as in plant nomenclature, impeding analyses at the continental scale. These issues have partly been solved by the recently published pan-European EIV systems (Hájek et al 2020;Midolo et al 2023;Tichý et al 2023) but their coverage of indicators and taxa, respectively, is far from complete. Thus, there is still an urgent need for an integrated and comprehensive EIV system for Europe.…”

“…material 1. Tsyganov (1983) hensive set of vascular plants and bryophytes occurring in mires, while Midolo et al (2023) Indicator values are widely applied in vegetation science and global change studies. They are suitable to indirectly assess environmental conditions and the drivers of observed vegetation differences in time or space (see review by Diekmann 2003).…”

Effectiveness of different metrics of floristic quality assessment: The simpler, the better?

“…However, the changes in quality of communities, habitats, and ecosystems induced by human disturbance are difficult to quantify and to disentangle from natural processes. Thus, these indicators might not always be successful in assessing environmental quality (Sebald et al 2021;Midolo et al, 2022).…”