Volume 28 (2022) Article 09

Scots pine bog woodlands in the Eastern Carpathians versus their northern, lowland counterparts: floristic dissimilarities and underlying ecological gradients

by A.I. Stoica, D. Gafta, G. Coldea

Published online: 25.04.2022

Summary

We investigated the floristic dissimilarities and their ecological drivers between three regional groups of Scots pine woodlands from mires dispersed along a latitudinal gradient in Eastern Europe. Phytosociological data regarding such woodland communities from the Eastern Carpathians (Romania) and lowlands of Poland and Latvia were collected from 47 published relevés. In spite of the small number of good discriminant species, the relative positions of the three regional groups of communities in the bi-dimensional ordination space roughly matched their geographical separation along latitude and longitude. When the spatial autocorrelation was filtered out, the three regional groups of communities appeared partly overlapping in the two-dimensional ordination space, whose axes correlated with the occurrences of some species that are typical of either open or wooded bogs and, respectively, either hummocks or hollows. The total herb cover was negatively and significantly correlated with both the first partial ordination axis and total shrub cover. We concluded that the observed, small floristic dissimilarities were mainly induced by weak, small-scale gradients of autogenic successional development and groundwater level/microtopography. Our results do not support the distinction of a montane, Eastern Carpathian vicariant of the syntaxon Vaccinio uliginosi-Pinetum sylvestris from the lowlands of Central and Baltic Europe.

Citation

Stoica, A.I., Gafta, D., Coldea G. (2022) Scots pine bog woodlands in the Eastern Carpathians versus their northern, lowland counterparts: floristic dissimilarities and underlying ecological gradients. Mires and Peat, 28, 09, 15pp. (Online: http://www.mires-and-peat.net/pages/volumes/map28/map2809.php); doi: 10.19189/MaP.2021.APG.StA.2337

Reviewers

IMCG and IPS acknowledge the work of the reviewers.