Vegetation of European oak-hornbeam forests – an introduction to the project
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| Year of publication | 2015 |
| Type | Conference abstract |
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| Description | Oak-hornbeam forests are mesophilous deciduous forests dominated by oaks and mesophilous tree species. Mesophilous forest herbs prevail in their field layer and their floristic composition is influenced by both environmental and historical factors. They are distributed at lower altitudes of Europe, mainly in the subcontinental climatic regions of the temperate zone. In Central and Western Europe oak-hornbeam forests are predominantly classified within the alliance Carpinion betuli . Nevertheless their association-level syntaxonomy on the supranational scale is still unre- solved and syntaxonomical systems used in different countries are rather inconsistent. Across the whole of Europe the situation is even less clear. About fifteen alliances of oak-hornbeam for- ests are currently recognized in Europe, but syntaxonomical revision based on numerical analy- sis of international data sets still missing. The first aim of this starting project is to prepare a da- taset of phytosociological relevés of oak-hornbeam forests from the whole continent. Relevés were obtained mainly from the European Vegetation Archive (EVA) using a two-step selection procedure. In the first step relevés classified by their authors to the alliances of oak-hornbeam forests were selected. In the second step other relevés were chosen that contained at least one of the tree species characteristic of oak-hornbeam forests with a cover higher than 5%. Applying this approach a primary dataset was obtained. This dataset contains ca. 84,000 relevés, of which ca. 19,000 were classified by their authors to the alliances of oak-hornbeam forests, ca. 43,000 were classified to other alliances and the rest of them remains unclassified on the alliance level. In the next step relevés of the primary dataset are subject to stratified resampling using various approaches. Subsequently relevés containing the target vegetation will be classified and a re- vised syntaxonomical system (on the association level for Central and Western Europe, on the alliance level for the whole Europe) based on the results of numerical analysis will be propose. |
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