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Science Enabled by Specimen Data

Marchuk, E. A., A. K. Kvitchenko, L. A. Kameneva, A. A. Yuferova, and D. E. Kislov. 2024. East Asian forest-steppe outpost in the Khanka Lowland (Russia) and its conservation. Journal of Plant Research 137: 997–1018. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10265-024-01570-z

The Khanka Lowland forest-steppe is the most eastern outpost of the Eurasian steppe biome. It includes unique grassland plant communities with rare steppe species. These coenosis have changed under the influence of anthropogenic activity, especially during the last 100 years and included both typical steppe species and nemoral mesophytic species. To distinguish these ecological groups of plants the random forest method with three datasets of environmental variables was applied. Specifically, a model of classification with the most important bioindices to predict a mesophytic ecological group of plants with a sensitivity greater than 80% was constructed. The data demonstrated the presence of steppe species that arrived at different times in the Primorye Territory. Most of these species are associated with the Mongolian-Daurian relict steppe complex and habit in the Khanka Lowland. Other species occur only in mountains in Primorye Territory and do not persist in the Khanka Lowland. These findings emphasize the presence of relict steppe communities with a complex of true steppe species in the Khanka Lowland. Steppe communities exhibit features of anthropogenic influence definitely through the long land use period but are not anthropogenic in origin. The most steppe species are located at the eastern border of distribution in the Khanka Lowlands and are valuable in terms of conservation and sources of information about steppe species origin and the emergence of the steppe biome as a whole.

Xue, T., S. R. Gadagkar, T. P. Albright, X. Yang, J. Li, C. Xia, J. Wu, and S. Yu. 2021. Prioritizing conservation of biodiversity in an alpine region: Distribution pattern and conservation status of seed plants in the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. Global Ecology and Conservation 32: e01885. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gecco.2021.e01885

The Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP) harbors abundant and diverse plant life owing to its high habitat heterogeneity. However, the distribution pattern of biodiversity hotspots and their conservation status remain unclear. Based on 148,283 high-resolution occurrence coordinates of 13,450 seed plants, w…

Bontrager, M., T. Usui, J. A. Lee‐Yaw, D. N. Anstett, H. A. Branch, A. L. Hargreaves, C. D. Muir, and A. L. Angert. 2021. Adaptation across geographic ranges is consistent with strong selection in marginal climates and legacies of range expansion. Evolution 75: 1316–1333. https://doi.org/10.1111/evo.14231

Every species experiences limits to its geographic distribution. Some evolutionary models predict that populations at range edges are less well‐adapted to their local environments due to drift, expansion load, or swamping gene flow from the range interior. Alternatively, populations near range edges…

Peyre, G., J. Lenoir, D. N. Karger, M. Gomez, A. Gonzalez, O. Broennimann, and A. Guisan. 2020. The fate of páramo plant assemblages in the sky islands of the northern Andes B. Jiménez‐Alfaro [ed.],. Journal of Vegetation Science 31: 967–980. https://doi.org/10.1111/jvs.12898

Aims: Assessing climate change impacts on biodiversity is a main scientific challenge, especially in the tropics, therefore, we predicted the future of plant species and communities on the unique páramo sky islands. We implemented the Spatially Explicit Species Assemblage Modelling framework, by i) …