Formalized classification of oak-hornbeam forest vegetation in Central and Western Europe: the first insights
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| Year of publication | 2016 |
| Type | Conference abstract |
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| Description | Oak -hornbeam forests are one of the most common type of European mesophilous forest vegetation. The centre of their distribution is in the Central and Western Europe, especially in low -altitude regions with subcontinental climate. In spite of wide distrib ution of this vegetation type, their association -level syntaxonomy on the supranational scale is still unresolved and syntaxonomical systems used in different countries are rather inconsistent. In Central and Western Europe approximately 35 associations of oak -hornbeam forests has been recognized in literature in the last decades, but some of them are not validly described in the sense of the current International Code of Phytosociological Nomenclature or their syntaxonomical status is unclear. The main aim s of the project are as follows: (1) To make a syntaxonomical revision of the associations described so far. (2) To propose a revised syntaxonomical system with formally delimited syntaxa. A representative dataset of relevés of the target vegetation in the study region had to be prepared. Relevés were obtained especially from the European Vegetation Archive (EVA). We selected relevés classified by their authors to oak -hornbeam forest syntaxa (mainly the alliance Carpinion betuli ) as well as relevés with a t otal cover of tree species typical of oak -hornbeam forests higher than 5%. In the next step these relevés (ca. 33 000) were resampled according to their species composition to obtain a more representative dataset of the target vegetation. The final dataset contained more than 5000 relevés of oak -hornbeam forest vegetation. Using this dataset a revision of the associations was done based on multiple comparisons of species composition and the validity of the names of the accepted associations was checked according to the Code. Finally formal definitions of the studied syntaxa were prepared in the Juice software using formal logi |
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