Photo: Jaroslav Kafíčko Petráň, archiv Ptačího parku Josefovské louky
The diversity of plants in Europe’s forests, wetlands and meadows is rapidly declining. This long-term trend has been confirmed by data collected by botanists from Masaryk University in Brno in collaboration with their European colleagues. To assess the changes in flora, vegetation and habitats, they created the largest database to date. I asked Milan Chytrý from the university’s department of zoology and botany how they collected the data:
“We simply sent invitations to our colleagues from across Europe asking them to take their data and enter them into a single database.
“The thing is that many botanists and plant ecologists across Europe collect data on species composition of flora in specific locations and many of these observations are repeated in time on the same location.
“They are usually used for analysis of species change in a small region, maybe in a specific habitat like in a single forest or single grassland, but they have never been integrated into one database, so that was our aim.
See the rest here.