Biogeographical patterns in the British and Irish flora

Abstract

The hectad (10×10 km square) distributions of the 1405 native British and Irish vascular plants were classified by the SPHERIKM cluster analysis program into 20 clusters, each of which is characterised by the key species used to initiate the cluster. The clusters reflect the influence of climate, altitude, geology, and habitat on distribution patterns at this scale. Clusters with restricted distributions have high concentrations of threatened species, particularly the Medicago sativa cluster, centred on Breckland (55% of the species are threatened in Britain, although only 29% are regarded as priorities for conservation), and the Carex atrata cluster of montane species (45% threatened, and 49% conservation priority species). Some clusters are composed predominantly of species with similar European distributions whereas others are much more phytogeographically heterogeneous. A comparison with a similar analysis of the distribution of British and Irish mosses and liverworts reveals many similarities, especially between the vascular plants and the mosses, although there are many more common vascular plants than bryophytes and many more coastal species.

Keywords:

• climate
• cluster analysis
• coast
• geology
• phytogeography
• SPHERIKM
• threat

This paper is based on a paper given at a BSBI Conference ‘A great leap forward – Biological Recording since the 1962 Atlas of the British Flora’, held in Edinburgh in 2012. We thank all those recorders who contributed records to the New Atlas dataset analysed here. The distribution maps were plotted using the DMAP program written by Dr A. J. Morton.