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...

Aim The former continental‐scale studies modelled coarse‐grained plant species‐richness patterns (gamma diversity). Here we aim to refine this information for European forests by (a) modelling the number of vascular plant species that co‐occur in local communities (alpha diversity) within spatial units of 400 m 2 ; and (b) assessing the factors likely determining the observed spatial patterns in alpha diversity. Location Europ...

Although natural riparian woodlands are an important feature that affects the quality of aquatic conditionsin streams and rivers, surveying riparian zone flora is rarely implemented in the Mediterraneancountries. We developed a rapid assessment method for gathering standardized plot-based woody flora andvegetation data from riparian woodlands. In 2005 we surveyed 218 streamside vegetation plots at 109 sitesin upland areas of f...