The richest vascular plant community ever recorded on Earth at the 10-m2 grain size, 115 species. It is a semi-natural, meso-xeric grassland near Cluj-Napoca, Transylvania, Romania
The richest vascular plant community ever recorded on Earth at the 10-m2 grain size, 115 species. It is a semi-natural, meso-xeric grassland near Cluj-Napoca, Transylvania, Romania Although it sounds weird, it is true: the steppes of Eastern Europe are home to a similar number of plant species as the regions of the Amazon rainforest. This is only seen when species are counted in small sampling areas rather than hectares of land. An international research team led by Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) and the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig has now demonstrated how much estimates of plant diversity change when the sampling area ranges from a few square metres to hectares. Their findings were published in the journal "Nature Communications" and have the potential to be used in new, more tailored nature conservation strategies. Mohamed Zakaria Hatim, a PhD Candidate at Wageningen University & Research, and part of the research team explain that the project took around two and a half years to be accomplished. "We analysed a dataset of around 170,000 vegetation plot records from all of the Earth's climatic zones.
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