Ecological Indicator Values for Europe (EIVE) 1.0

Abstract

Aims: To develop a consistent ecological indicator value system for Europe for five of the main plant niche dimensions: soil moisture (M), soil nitrogen (N), soil reaction (R), light (L) and temperature (T). Study area: Europe (and closely adjacent regions). Methods: We identified 31 indicator value systems for vascular plants in Europe that contained assessments on at least one of the five aforementioned niche dimensions. We rescaled the indicator values of each dimension to a continuous scale, in which 0 represents the minimum and 10 the maximum value present in Europe. Taxon names were harmonised to the Euro+Med Plantbase. For each of the five dimensions, we calculated European values for niche position and niche width by combining the values from the individual EIV systems. Using T values as an example, we externally validated our European indicator values against the median of bioclimatic conditions for global occurrence data of the taxa. Results: In total, we derived European indicator values of niche position and niche width for 14,835 taxa (14,714 for M, 13,748 for N, 14,254 for R, 14,054 for L, 14,496 for T). Relating the obtained values for temperature niche position to the bioclimatic data of species yielded a higher correlation than any of the original EIV systems (r = 0.859). The database: The newly developed Ecological Indicator Values for Europe (EIVE) 1.0, together with all source systems, is available in a flexible, harmonised open access database. Conclusions: EIVE is the most comprehensive ecological indicator value system for European vascular plants to date. The uniform interval scales for niche position and niche width provide new possibilities for ecological and macroecological analyses of vegetation patterns. The developed workflow and documentation will facilitate the future release of updated and expanded versions of EIVE, which may for example include the addition of further taxonomic groups, additional niche dimensions, external validation or regionalisation. Abbreviations: EIV = Ecological indicator value; EIVE = Ecological Indicator Values for Europe; EVA = European Vegetation Archive; GBIF = Global Biodiversity Information Facility; i = index for taxa; j = index for EIV systems; L = ecological indicator for light; M = ecological indicator for moisture; N = ecological indicator for nitrogen availability; R = ecological indicator for reaction; T = ecological indicator for temperature.

Ecological indicator values of understorey plants perform poorly to infer forest microclimate temperature

“…However, confirmation by larger‐scale studies, both in space and time, is needed. At a European level, future studies may use the newly available harmonized EIVs (Vangansbeke et al., 2021; Dengler et al., 2023; Tichý et al., 2023) together with vegetation plot data from EVA (Chytrý et al., 2016) and high‐resolution maps of understorey temperature (Haesen et al., 2021) to confirm or deny our findings at a larger spatial extent.…”

Nutrient‐demanding and thermophilous plants dominate urban forest‐edge vegetation across temperate Europe

“…In a second step, we extracted species indicator values for light, moisture, nutrients and reaction (i.e., soil pH) from the Ecological Indicator Values for Europe (EIVE) database (Dengler et al, 2023).…”

Vegetation Classification and Survey in the third year

“…A second article type, which is very attractive to authors and readers as it can make a large scientific impact, are methodological papers, called VCS Methods in our journal. No VCS Methods paper was published in 2022, but there was one in 2021 (Janišová et al 2021) on sampling vegetation together with farmer interviews, highlighted in our last editorial (Dengler et al 2022), and there is one that is published in early 2023: Dengler et al (2023) present the Ecological Indicator Values for Europe (EIVE), a comprehensive indicator values system for nearly 15,000 vascular plant taxa in Europe and adjacent areas which they derived by mathematically matching the information of 31 source systems from across Europe into a single consensus system. While this system was mainly developed to support continent-wide classification and macroecological studies of vegetation, first tests indicate that it also might work well in regional contexts.…”