engleski

Representativeness of actual vegetation maps – GAP analysis for lowland Croatia

Actual vegetation maps depicting the contemporary distribution of vegetation types are important input of a wide range of ecological analyses, such as predictive mapping including modelling the potential natural vegetation, connectivity analyses and also that of conservation planning. Large-scale modelling campaigns cannot carry out extensive vegetation mappings in the typically limited time frames, thus they naturally rely on existing maps. However, vegetation mappings are carried out for a range of purposes, which does not necessarily ensure representativeness. We collected existing vegetation maps from lowland Croatia and analyzed them with regards to representativeness of vegetation types regarding their distribution in the geographic and environmental space. The spatial range was restricted to the Croatian lowlands neighbouring Hungary in the current analysis. Data availability was mapped for individual vegetation types as the distance to the closest mapped stand (also an inverse proxy of connectivity). Environmental space considered included climatic, topographic, soil and water availability gradients. Frequency of vegetation type occurrences was identified along sections of the gradient. The gaps discovered will be utilized in planning a field campaign to complement the existing vegetation maps so as to achieve representativeness. This way they will also feed into the validation of potential natural vegetation models of the area.

connectivity, environmental gradients, gap analysis, potential natural vegetation, vegetation mapping

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