PREMISE OF THE STUDY California's vascular flora is the most diverse and threatened in temperate North America. Previous studies of spatial patterns of Californian plant diversity have been limited by traditional metrics, non-uniform geographic units, and distributional data derived from floristic descriptions for only a subset of species. METHODS We revisited patterns of sampling intensity, ...

The factors responsible for maintaining diverse groundcover plant communities of high conservation value in frequently burned wet pine savannas are poorly understood. While most management involves manipulating extrinsic factors important in maintaining species diversity (e.g., fire regimes), most ecological theory (e.g., niche theory and neutral theory) examines how traits exhibited by the spe...

(Horizontal and vertical tree community structure in a lowland Atlantic Rain Forest, Southeastern Brazil). The horizontal and vertical tree community structure in a lowland Atlantic Rain Forest was investigated through a phytosociological survey in two 0.99 ha plots in the Intervales State Park, São Paulo State. All trees ≥ 5 cm diameter at breast height were recorded. 3,078 individuals belongi...

The purpose of this study was to update the floristic inventory found in the Upper Paraná River floodplain. Floristic surveys were performed from February 2000 through March 2008, as part of the Brazilian Long-Term Ecological Research Program (PELD/CNPq-Site 6). The material collected was identified from 774 species, 442 genera, and 116 families. The ten families with high species richness were...

One of the main steps in road and railway embankment restoration is the spreading of previously removed topsoil, which provides an input of seeds, organic matter and microorganisms and encourages the establishment of a vegetation cover, essential to stabilise the embankment and blend it with the landscape. However, topsoil is a scarce resource, prompting the search for economic alternatives wit...

A long-standing observation in community ecology is that the scaling of species richness, as exemplified by species-area curves, differs on local and regional scales. This decoupling of scales may be largely due to sampling processes (the increasing constraint imposed by sampling fewer individuals at fine scales), as distinct from ecological processes, such as environmental heterogeneity, that ...

Plants, with an estimated 300,000 species, provide crucial primary production and ecosystem structure. To date, our quantitative understanding of diversity gradients of megadiverse clades such as plants has been hampered by the paucity of distribution data. Here, we investigate the global-scale species-richness pattern of vascular plants and examine its environmental and potential historical de...

The greater number of plant species in temperate eastern Asia compared to eastern North America has been ascribed to both local environment and regional characteristics, but the relative contributions of each have not been resolved. In this analysis, we related species richness of flowering plants in mesoscale floras (B/10 km) dominated by temperate forest vegetation to area, elevation, latitud...

The construction of linear transport infrastructure has severe effects on ecosystem functions and properties, and the restoration of the associated roadslopes contributes to reduce its impact. This restoration is usually approached from the perspective of plant cover regeneration, ignoring plant-soil interactions and the consequences for plant growth. The addition of a 30 cm layer of topsoil is...