Diversity, knowledge and spatial distribution of the vascular flora of Croatia

Abstract

The Balkan Peninsula is recognized as an important centre of plant diversity. Despite the fact that Croatia contains more than 50% of all Balkan species of vascular flora, the knowledge of the spatial distribution, α-diversity and relation to the conservation efforts have never been summarized and presented. A spatial analysis was performed on several data-sets containing a number of records and a number of species per grid cell. Results show that the Croatian flora consists of 4507 species and 1159 subspecies. The residuals around the linear regression used as a measure of the species richness indicate that Croatia had the highest residual value among the 40 European countries sampled and highest stress on the biodiversity value of the Apennine, the Iberian and the Balkan peninsulas. On the basis of half a million findings and their spatial distributions, we observed that within one grid cell (35 km²) 542 species could be expected. A number of records based on the herbarium specimens, literature and field observation and related spatial distribution were discussed. The spatial distribution of α-diversity indicates that the national hot spots were more consistent with the important plant areas network than with the network of officially protected areas.

Keywords::

• Floristic data
• conservation
• biodiversity
• biogeography
• hot spot
• spatial analysis

Acknowledgements

The financial support for the research and the preparation of the article were obtained from the Ministry of Science and Technology, Republic of Croatia, project “Diversity of vascular flora within Adriatic area” (ref. id. 119-1191193-1227). We are obliged to numerous colleagues for their contributions to the underlying inventory of the vascular flora in Croatia. We would like to thank the numerous FCD collaborators, who worked for decades on digitalization and geo-coding of the reference records, field observations and herbarium collections.