Apparently, there are many places on Earth that have plant species diversity similar to that of the Amazon rainforest. This surprising finding was revealed by an international team of researchers who used artificial intelligence to analyse a dataset of approximately 170,000 vegetation samples from all climate zones and determined how estimates of plant diversity changed as the sampling area varied from a few square metres to hectares. The researchers have created a new global map of plant diversity based on surveys of small areas (10–1000 m2).
This scientific study, in which scientists from Masaryk University’s Faculty of Science played a significant role, has now been published in the journal ‘Nature Communications’, and it is hoped that its results will help guide nature protection in new directions.
“It has long been emphasised in biogeography and ecology that most plant species occur in tropical regions and that species diversity decreases from the equator toward the poles. This is true, but only when we evaluate data on the number of species in large areas, such as landscape units or administrative regions”, explained the Director of the Department of Botany and Zoology of Masaryk University’s Faculty of Science, Milan Chytrý, who is one of the authors of the Nature Communications article. Until now, there were no globally representative data on the number of species in plant communities in small areas (10–1000 m2).
The researchers from the Institute of Botany and Zoology used of the world vegetation database sPlot, which they founded together with their German colleagues from the iDiv Institute Halle-Jena-Leipzig in 2013. They prepared all European data and part of the data from Siberia for the database. Other Czech co-authors outside Masaryk University prepared data from their field research in East Asia, the Himalayas and the Andes.
“Using data from the sPlot database, we found that while tropical rainforests are still among the most species-rich ecosystems in the world, species-rich forests can also be found in non-tropical regions. We found that species-rich non-forest ecosystems occur both within and outside the tropics. This may be a new and perhaps surprising finding for some, but it fits well with studies we carried out in Central Europe and Southern Siberia ten years ago”, Milan Chytrý explained.
Finding out which areas and habitat types contain high species diversity in small areas can help in establishing protected areas and allow for joint protection of several endangered species. Increasing our knowledge of the distribution of species richness will help in deciding on priorities in nature conservation. Following the recently published article, several new studies on different aspects of global plant community diversity are being prepared by the team of the Department of Botany and Zoology in cooperation with experts from the Czech Republic and abroad as part of the sPlot database.
Brno, the city where Gregor Mendel laid the foundations of genetics, became the European centre of synthetic biology last week. From the 6th to the 8th of November, Brno’s planetarium hosted the prestigious Applied Synthetic Biology in Europe VII conference, focusing on the practical applications of...
Ten graduates from the MU Faculty of Science, along with their supervisors and consultants, have received Masaryk University Vice-Rector’s Awards for excellent results in their doctoral studies. Congratulations.
