Pladias Database of the Czech flora and vegetation

Abstract

The Pladias (Plant Diversity Analysis and Synthesis) Database of the Czech Flora and Vegetation was developed by the Pladias project team in 2014-2018 and has been continuously updated since then. The flora section of the database contains critically revised information on the Czech vascular flora, including 13.6 million plant occurrence records, which are dynamically displayed in maps, and data on 120 plant characteristics (traits, environmental associations and other information), divided into the sections: (1) Habitus and growth type, (2) Leaf, (3) Flower, (4) Fruit, seed and dispersal, (5) Belowground organs and clonality, (6) Trophic mode, (7) Karyology, (8) Taxon origin, (9) Ecological indicator values, (10) Habitat and sociology, (11) Distribution and frequency, and (12) Threats and protection. The vegetation section of the database contains information on Czech vegetation types extracted from the monograph Vegetation of the Czech Republic. The data are supplemented by national botanical bibliographies, electronic versions of the standard national flora and vegetation monographs, a database of more than 19,000 pictures of plant taxa and vegetation types, and digital maps (shapefiles) with botanical information. The data from the database are available online on a public portal www.pladias.cz, which also provides download options for various datasets and online identification keys to the species and vegetation types of the Czech Republic. In this paper, we describe the general scope, structure and content of the database, and details of the data on plant characteristics. To illustrate the data and describe the main geographic patterns in selected plant characteristics, we provide maps of mean values of numerical characteristics or proportions of categories for categorical characteristics on the map of the country in a grid of 5 longitudinal × 3 latitudinal minutes (approximately 6.0 km × 5.5 km). We also summarize the main variation patterns in the functional traits in the Czech flora using the principal component analysis.

Disentangling the Ecological Determinants of Species and Functional Trait Diversity in Herb-Layer Plant Communities in European Temperate Forests

“…Clonal and bud bank traits were extracted from the CLO-PLA database [83,84]. Useful definitions for these traits are available in the Pladias online database [85] (https://pladias. cz/en/ accessed on 15 December 2020).…”

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“…The syntaxonomic structure and circumscription of the class are quite debatable, especially after publication of the European Vegetation Checklist, where annual segetal and ruderal vegetation is distributed among four higher units of classification (Mucina et al, 2016 Mucina et al 2016, which unites thermophilous grass-rich anthropogenic vegetation rich in summer-annual C 4 species of the southern nemoral, mediterranean-type, steppe and semi-desert zones of Europe (Mucina et al, 2016). Some phytosociologists Український ботанічний журнал, 2021, 78(3) support such syntaxonomic differentiation of segetalruderal annual vegetation (Arepieva, 2017(Arepieva, , 2019Küzmič et al, 2018;Nazarov et al, 2019;Bulokhov et al, 2019), while other scientists continue to consider these plant communities within one widely circumscribed class Stellarietea mediae (Golovanov, Abramova, 2018;Dubyna et al, 2019;Chytrý et al, 2021). It is obvious that the typological and botanical-geographical differentiation of syntaxa proposed by L. Mucina and co-authors (Mucina et al, 2016) is open to discussion and needs further development because many questions remain unanswered, in particular, those related to differentiation of segetal and ruderal vegetation, the hierarchical position of classification units of middle ranks, their territorial distribution, etc.…”

Ruderal vegetation of Kyiv City. I. Class Stellarietea mediae Tx. et al. in Tx. 1950

“…In addition, a new class was distinguished, Digitario sanguinalis-Eragrostietea minoris Mucina, Lososová et Šilc in Mucina et al 2016, which unites thermophilous grass-rich anthropogenic vegetation rich in summer-annual C 4 species of the southern nemoral, mediterranean-type, steppe and semi-desert zones of Europe (Mucina et al, 2016). Some phytosociologists Український ботанічний журнал, 2021, 78(3) support such syntaxonomic differentiation of segetalruderal annual vegetation (Arepieva, 2017(Arepieva, , 2019Küzmič et al, 2018;Nazarov et al, 2019;Bulokhov et al, 2019), while other scientists continue to consider these plant communities within one widely circumscribed class Stellarietea mediae (Golovanov, Abramova, 2018;Dubyna et al, 2019;Chytrý et al, 2021). It is obvious that the typological and botanical-geographical differentiation of syntaxa proposed by L. Mucina and co-authors (Mucina et al, 2016) is open to discussion and needs further development because many questions remain unanswered, in particular, those related to differentiation of segetal and ruderal vegetation, the hierarchical position of classification units of middle ranks, their territorial distribution, etc.…”