Motivation Assessing biodiversity status and trends in plant communities is critical for understanding, quantifying and predicting the effects of global change on ecosystems. Vegetation plots record the occurrence or abundance of all plant species co‐occurring within delimited local areas. This allows species absences to be inferred, information seldom provided by existing global plant datasets. Although many vegetation plots...

Plant species that negatively affect their environment by encroachment require constant management and monitoring through field surveys. Drones have been suggested to support field surveyors allowing more accurate mapping with just-in-time aerial imagery. Furthermore, object-based image analysis tools could increase the accuracy of species maps. However, only few studies compare species distribution maps resulting from traditi...

Aim In tropical Africa, savannas cover huge areas, have high plant species richness and are considered as a major natural resource for most countries. There is, however, little information available on their floristics and biogeography at the continental scale, despite the importance of such information for our understanding of the drivers of species diversity at various scales and for effective conservation and management. He...