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Christian König

Christian König
No affiliation

PhD
Freelance Data Scientist

About

34
Publications
61,118
Reads
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3,649
Citations
Introduction
Additional affiliations
April 2020 - July 2021
Universität Potsdam
Position
  • PostDoc Position
April 2019 - April 2020
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Position
  • PostDoc Position

Publications

Publications (34)
Article
Full-text available
A prominent hypothesis in ecology is that larger species ranges are found in more variable climates because species develop broader environmental tolerances, predicting a positive range size-temperature variability relationship. However, this overlooks the extreme temperatures that variable climates impose on species, with upper or lower thermal li...
Article
Full-text available
Here we provide the ‘Global Spectrum of Plant Form and Function Dataset’, containing species mean values for six vascular plant traits. Together, these traits –plant height, stem specific density, leaf area, leaf mass per area, leaf nitrogen content per dry mass, and diaspore (seed or spore) mass – define the primary axes of variation in plant form...
Article
Full-text available
Islands are hotspots of plant endemism and are particularly vulnerable to the establishment (naturalization) of alien plant species. Naturalized species richness on islands depends on several biogeographical and socioeconomic factors, but especially on remoteness. One potential explanation for this is that the phylogenetically imbalanced compositio...
Article
Full-text available
Models are useful tools for understanding and predicting ecological patterns and processes. Under ongoing climate and biodiversity change, they can greatly facilitate decision-making in conservation and restoration and help designing adequate management strategies for an uncertain future. Here, we review the use of spatially explicit models for dec...
Article
Full-text available
Regional species assemblages have been shaped by colonization, speciation and extinction over millions of years. Humans have altered biogeography by introducing species to new ranges. However, an analysis of how strongly naturalized plant species (i.e. alien plants that have established self-sustaining populations) affect the taxonomic and phylogen...
Article
Full-text available
Models are useful tools for understanding and predicting ecological patterns and processes. Under ongoing climate and biodiversity change, they can greatly facilitate decision‐making in conservation and restoration and help designing adequate management strategies for an uncertain future. Here, we review the use of spatially explicit models for dec...
Article
Full-text available
Aim Vascular epiphytes are ubiquitous components of wet tropical forests where they contribute substantially to local and regional plant diversity. While some basic epiphyte distribution patterns are relatively well studied, little effort has been made to understand the drivers responsible for constraining their global distribution. This study quan...
Article
Full-text available
Plant colonization of islands may be limited by the availability of symbionts, particularly arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi, which have limited dispersal ability compared to ectomycorrhizal and ericoid (EEM) as well as orchid mycorrhizal (ORC) fungi. We tested for such differential island colonization within contemporary angiosperm floras worldwi...
Article
Predictions of species' current and future ranges are needed to effectively manage species under environmental change. Species ranges are typically estimated using correlative species distribution models (SDMs), which have been criticized for their static nature. In contrast, dynamic occupancy models (DOMs) explicitily describe temporal changes in...
Article
Full-text available
Aim Separating the biotic and abiotic factors controlling species distributions has been a long‐standing challenge in ecology and biogeography. Joint species distribution models (JSDMs) have emerged as a promising statistical framework towards this objective by simultaneously modelling the environmental responses of multiple species and approximati...
Article
Full-text available
Motivation Trait data are fundamental to the quantitative description of plant form and function. Although root traits capture key dimensions related to plant responses to changing environmental conditions and effects on ecosystem processes, they have rarely been included in large‐scale comparative studies and global models. For instance, root trai...
Article
Full-text available
Island disharmony refers to the biased representation of higher taxa on islands compared to their mainland source regions and represents a central concept in island biology. Here, we develop a generalizable framework for approximating these source regions and conduct the first global assessment of island disharmony and its underlying drivers. We co...
Article
Full-text available
Species distribution models (SDMs) constitute the most common class of models across ecology, evolution and conservation. The advent of ready‐to‐use software packages and increasing availability of digital geoinformation have considerably assisted the application of SDMs in the past decade, greatly enabling their broader use for informing conservat...
Article
Full-text available
Island disharmony refers to the biased representation of higher taxa on islands compared to their mainland source regions and represents a central concept in island biology. Here, we develop a generalizable framework for approximating these source regions and conduct the first global assessment of island disharmony and its underlying drivers. We co...
Article
Full-text available
Species distribution models (SDMs) constitute the most common class of models across ecology, evolution and conservation. The advent of ready‐to‐use software packages and increasing availability of digital geoinformation have considerably assisted the application of SDMs in the past decade, greatly enabling their broader use for informing conservat...
Preprint
Full-text available
Motivation Trait data are fundamental to quantitatively describe plant form and function. Although root traits capture key dimensions related to plant responses to changing environmental conditions and effects on ecosystem processes, they have rarely been included in large-scale comparative studies and global models. For instance, root traits remai...
Article
Full-text available
Aim We tested whether species–area relationships of small islands differ among plant growth forms and whether this influences the prevalence of the small‐island effect (SIE). The SIE states that species richness on small islands is independent of island area or relates to area in a different way compared with larger islands. We investigated whether...
Article
Full-text available
Plant traits—the morphological, anatomical, physiological, biochemical and phenological characteristics of plants—determine how plants respond to environmental factors, affect other trophic levels, and influence ecosystem properties and their benefits and detriments to people. Plant trait data thus represent the basis for a vast area of research sp...
Article
Full-text available
Aim Local richness is a result of both regional richness and local site‐specific factors. We quantify the effects of different regional (dispersal, environmental filtering) and local (habitat selection) community assembly processes in the Cape reeds (Restionaceae) of the Cape flora and test if community assembly processes vary spatially. Location...
Preprint
Full-text available
Island species and habitats are particularly vulnerable to human disturbances, and anthropogenic changes are increasingly overwriting natural island biogeographic patterns. However, quantitative comparisons of how native and alien assemblages respond to human disturbances are scarce. Using data from 6,252 species (vertebrates, invertebrates and pla...
Article
Full-text available
Recent years have seen an explosion in the availability of biodiversity data describing the distribution, function, and evolutionary history of life on earth. Integrating these heterogeneous data remains a challenge due to large variations in observational scales, collection purposes, and terminologies. Here, we conceptualize widely used biodiversi...
Article
Full-text available
Aim To understand how functional traits and evolutionary history shape the geographic distribution of plant life on Earth, we need to integrate high‐quality and global‐scale distribution data with functional and phylogenetic information. Large‐scale distribution data for plants are, however, often restricted to either certain taxonomic groups or ge...
Article
Questions Small islands are ideal model systems to study community assembly. Due to harsher environmental conditions on smaller islands compared to larger ones, environmental filtering may preclude some species, potentially resulting in island size‐dependent species pools. We tested whether the species pool size follows a similar species‐area relat...
Article
Full-text available
One central concept in island biology is that island assemblages form subsets of the mainland species pool, being disproportionately rich or poor in certain taxonomic groups. This unbalanced composition, termed ‘disharmony’, is generally explained using a taxon‐centred approach, linking the over‐ or under‐representation of taxa to their colonisatio...
Preprint
Full-text available
Aim Disharmony is a key concept in island biology that describes the imbalance in the representation of higher taxa on islands compared to their mainland source regions. Although there are strong theoretical arguments for the differential colonization success of different taxa on islands, the empirical evidence for disharmony remains largely anecdo...
Article
Full-text available
Recent years have seen an explosion in the availability of biodiversity data describing the distribution, function, and evolutionary history of life on earth. Integrating these heterogeneous data remains a challenge due to large variations in observational scales, collection purposes, and terminologies. Here, we conceptualize widely used biodiversi...
Article
Full-text available
Island biogeography has traditionally focused primarily on abiotic drivers of colonization, extinction and speciation. However, establishment on islands could also be limited by biotic drivers, such as the absence of symbionts. Most plants, for example, form symbioses with mycorrhizal fungi, whose limited dispersal to islands could act as a coloniz...
Article
Full-text available
Aim To determine the global position of tree line isotherms, compare it with observed local tree limits on islands and mainlands, and disentangle the potential drivers of a difference between tree line and local tree limit. Location Global. Time period 1979–2013. Major taxa studied Trees. Methods We modelled the potential climatic tree line bas...
Preprint
Full-text available
To understand how traits and evolutionary history shape the geographic distribution of plant life on Earth, we need to integrate high-quality and global-scale distribution data with functional and phylogenetic information. Large-scale distribution data for plants are, however, often restricted to either certain taxonomic groups or geographic region...
Article
Full-text available
This dataset provides the Global Naturalized Alien Flora (GloNAF) database, version 1.2. GloNAF represents a data compendium on the occurrence and identity of naturalized alien vascular plant taxa across geographic regions (e.g. countries, states, provinces, districts, islands) around the globe. The dataset includes 13,939 taxa and covers 1,029 reg...
Article
Full-text available
Aim: To provide a global assessment of turnover in vascular plants across geographical settings and taxonomic and functional groups. We tested whether turnover and its spatial and environmental drivers are affected by the geographical setting and whether taxonomic and functional groups exhibit specific turnover patterns that are associated with the...

Questions

Question (1)
Question
Hi there.
Do you know of any digitally available checklists of vascular plants in the above mentioned regions? It does not need to be a database, pdfs would be just fine. There are lots of published inventories for the Americas and quite some for Europe, Africa and Southern Asia, but I hardly find any for Siberia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, China and so on. Particularly interesting would be checklists for national parks, natural reserves or counties.
It would be great if you could point me to some relevant resources. 

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