Francesco Maria SabatiniUniversity of Bologna | UNIBO · Dept. of Biological Geological and Environmental Sciences (BIGEA)
Francesco Maria Sabatini
PhD
About
94
Publications
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
February 2014 - September 2015
Education
September 2010 - March 2014
Publications
Publications (94)
Primary forests are critical for forest biodiversity and provide key ecosystem services. In Europe, these forests are particularly scarce and it is unclear whether they are sufficiently protected. Here we aim to: (a) understand whether extant primary forests are representative of the range of naturally occurring forest types, (b) identify forest ty...
Motivation
Assessing biodiversity status and trends in plant communities is critical for understanding, quantifying and predicting the effects of global change on ecosystems. Vegetation plots record the occurrence or abundance of all plant species co‐occurring within delimited local areas. This allows species absences to be inferred, information se...
Primary forests, defined here as forests where the signs of human impacts, if any, are strongly blurred due to decades without forest management, are scarce in Europe and continue to disappear. Despite these losses, we know little about where these forests occur. Here, we present a comprehensive geodatabase and map of Europe’s known primary forests...
Global patterns of regional (gamma) plant diversity are relatively well known, but whether these patterns hold for local communities, and the dependence on spatial grain, remain controversial. Using data on 170,272 georeferenced local plant assemblages, we created global maps of alpha diversity (local species richness) for vascular plants at three...
Long-term analyses of biodiversity data highlight a ‘biodiversity conservation
paradox’: biological communities show substantial species turnover over the past
century1,2, but changes in species richness are marginal1,3–5. Most studies, however,
have focused only on the incidence of species, and have not considered changes in
local abundance. Here...
Foliar traits such as specific leaf area (SLA), leaf nitrogen (N), and phosphorus (P) concentrations play important roles in plant economic strategies and ecosystem functioning. Various global maps of these foliar traits have been generated using statistical upscaling approaches based on in-situ trait observations. Here, we intercompare such global...
The Natura 2000 (N2K) protected area (PA) network is a crucial tool to limit biodiversity loss in Europe. Despite covering 18% of the European Union's (EU) land area, its effectiveness at conserving biodiversity across taxa and biogeographic regions remains uncertain. Testing this effectiveness is, however, difficult because it requires considering...
Monitoring vegetation trends against objective baselines is fundamental to quantify the impacts of global change on plant biodiversity. Vegetation plot time series are a gold standard in vegetation monitoring, but such data are missing for many regions. Southern Patagonia is an example of a region strongly impacted by climate change but lacking tim...
Evolutionary radiations of woody taxa within arid environments were made possible by multiple trait innovations including deep roots and embolism‐resistant xylem, but little is known about how these traits have coevolved across the phylogeny of woody plants or how they jointly influence the distribution of species.
We synthesized global trait and v...
Ecological processes are often spatially and temporally structured, potentially leading to autocorrelation either in environmental variables or species distribution data. Because of that, spatially-biased in-situ samples or predictors might affect the outcomes of ecological models used to infer the geographic distribution of species and diversity....
Aim
Theoretical, experimental and observational studies have shown that biodiversity–ecosystem functioning (BEF) relationships are influenced by functional community structure through two mutually non‐exclusive mechanisms: (1) the dominance effect (which relates to the traits of the dominant species); and (2) the niche partitioning effect [which re...
Foliar traits such as specific leaf area (SLA), leaf nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) concentrations play an important role in plant economic strategies and ecosystem functioning. Various global maps of these foliar traits have been generated using statistical upscaling approaches based on in-situ trait observations.Here, we intercompare such global...
Making predictions about species, including how they respond to environmental change, is a central challenge for ecologists. Due to the huge number of species, ecologists seek generalizations based on species’ traits and phylogenetic relationships, but the predictive power of trait-based and phylogenetic models is often low. Species co-occurrence p...
Ecological theory predicts close relationships between macroclimate and functional traits. Yet, global climatic gradients correlate only weakly with the trait composition of local plant communities, suggesting that important factors have been ignored. Here, we investigate the consistency of climate-trait relationships for plant communities in Europ...
Global maps of plant functional traits are essential for studying the dynamics of the terrestrial biosphere, yet the spatial distribution of trait measurements remains sparse. With the increasing popularity of species identification apps, citizen scientists contribute to growing vegetation data collections. The question emerges whether such opportu...
Aim:
Understanding the variation in community composition and species abundances (i.e., β-diversity) is at the heart of community ecology. A common approach to examine β-diversity is to evaluate directional variation in community composition by measuring the decay in the similarity among pairs of communities along spatial or environmental distance...
Large carnivores are making remarkable comebacks in Europe, but how this affects human-wildlife conflict remains unclear. Rebounding carnivore populations lead to increasing livestock depredation, which in turn leads to greater economic losses for farmers. However, returning carnivores could also influence the behavior of wild ungulates, which are...
High‐conservation‐value forests (HCVFs) are critically important for biodiversity and ecosystem service provisioning, but they face many threats. Where systematic HCVF inventories are missing, such as in parts of Eastern Europe, these forests remain largely unacknowledged and therefore often unprotected. We devised a novel, transferable approach fo...
With accelerating environmental change, understanding forest disturbance impacts on trade-offs between biodiversity and carbon dynamics is of high socioeconomic importance. Most studies, however, have assessed immediate or short-term effects of disturbance, while long-term impacts remain poorly understood. Using a tree-ring-based approach, we analy...
Ecological theory is built on trade-offs, where trait differences among species evolved as adaptations to different environments. Trade-offs are often assumed to be bidirectional, where opposite ends of a gradient in trait values confer advantages in different environments. However, unidirectional benefits could be widespread if extreme trait value...
Plant trait variation drives plant function, community composition and ecosystem processes. However, our current understanding of trait variation disproportionately relies on aboveground observations. Here we integrate root traits into the global framework of plant form and function. We developed and tested an overarching conceptual framework that...
Figure S1: Global principal component analysis (PCA) of the world environmental conditions. The PCA is based on the matrix of all terrestrial grid cells (n = 8,384,404, spatial grain = 2.5 arcmin) by 30
environmental variables. The PCA space represents the full environmental space of all terrestrial habitats on Earth, irrespective of whether a grid...
This demo illustrates how to import and manipulate sPlotOpen data to create some basic graphics or tables together with a reference list.
Christensen et al. criticized the application of Beals’ index of sociological favourability to adjust for incomplete species lists when comparing repeated surveys. Their main argument was that using Beals’ conditional occurrence probabilities would systematically underestimate biodiversity change compared to using observed frequencies. Although thi...
Aim
This work explores whether the commonly observed positive range size–niche breadth relationship exists for Fagus, one of the most dominant and widespread broad‐leaved deciduous tree genera in temperate forests of the Northern Hemisphere. Additionally, we ask whether the 10 extant Fagus species’ niche breadths and climatic tolerances are under p...
Aim
Alpine ecosystems differ in area, macroenvironment and biogeographical history across the Earth, but the relationship between these factors and plant species richness is still unexplored. Here, we assess the global patterns of plant species richness in alpine ecosystems and their association with environmental, geographical and historical facto...
Understanding the variation in community composition and species abundances, i.e., β-diversity, is at the heart of community ecology. A common approach to examine β-diversity is to evaluate directional turnover in community composition by measuring the decay in the similarity among pairs of communities along spatial or environmental distances. We p...
Aim: This work explores whether the commonly observed positive range size–niche breadth relationship exists for Fagus, one of the most dominant and widespread broad-leaved deciduous tree genera in temperate forests of the Northern Hemisphere. Additionally, we ask whether the 10 extant Fagus species’ niche breadths and climatic tolerances are under...
Questions
What are the functional trade‐offs of vascular plant species in global alpine ecosystems? How is functional variation related to vegetation zones, climatic groups and biogeographic realms? What is the relative contribution of macroclimate and evolutionary history in shaping the functional variation of alpine plant communities?
Location
G...
Managed forests are a key component of strategies aimed at tackling the climate and biodiversity crises. Tapping this potential requires a better understanding of the complex, simultaneous effects of forest management on biodiversity, carbon stocks and productivity. Here, we used data of 135 one-hectare plots from southwestern Germany to disentangl...
Aims
The effect of biogeographical processes on the spatial turnover component of beta‐diversity over large spatial extents remains scarcely understood. Here, we aim at disentangling the roles of environmental and historical factors on plant taxonomic and phylogenetic turnover, while controlling for the effects of species richness and rarity.
Loca...
Aim
To identify functional traits that best predict community assembly without knowing the underlying environmental drivers.
Methods
We propose a new method based on the correlation r(XY) between two matrices of potential community composition: the matrix X is fuzzy‐weighted by trait similarities of species, and the matrix Y is derived by Beals sm...
The European Primary Forest Database is a curated collection of (sub)-national and regional datasets on the distribution of primary forests in Europe. It contains geographical (GIS) data (point, polygons) on the location and boundaries of documented primary and old-growth forests in Europe
Loss of forest naturalness challenges the maintenance of green infrastructure (GI) for biodiversity conservation and delivery of diverse ecosystem services. Using the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Aichi target #11 with its quantitative and qualitative criteria as a normative model, we aim at supporting landscape planning through a pioneering...
Aim To identify functional traits that best predict community assembly without knowing the driving environmental factors.
Methods We propose a new method that is based on the correlation r(XY) between two matrices of potential community composition: matrix X is fuzzy-weighted by trait similarities of species, and matrix Y is derived by Beals smoot...
Defining the species pool of a community is crucial for many types of ecological analyses, providing a foundation to metacommunity, null modelling or dark diversity frameworks. It is a challenge to derive the species pool empirically from large and heterogeneous databases. Here, we propose a method to define a site‐specific species pool (SSSP), i.e...
Vegetation is the basis of all terrestrial ecosystems and a focus on vegetation is crucial to understand the consequences of global change on the biosphere. We believe that vegetation science has much to offer in the fight to biodiversity loss and climate change, by contributing to some of the most important basic and applied research questions. Th...
Questions: Vegetation-plot records provide information on presence and cover or abundance of plants co-occurring in the same community. Vegetation-plot data are spread across research groups, environmental agencies and biodiversity research centers, and thus, are rarely accessible at continental or global scales. Here we present the sPlot database,...
Aims: Vegetation-plot records provide information on the presence and cover or abundance of plants co-occurring in the same community. Vegetation-plot data are spread across research groups, environmental agencies and biodiversity research centers and, thus, are rarely accessible at continental or global scales. Here we present the sPlot database,...
Plant functional traits directly affect ecosystem functions. At the species level, trait combinations depend on trade-offs representing different ecological strategies, but at the community level trait combinations are expected to be decoupled from these trade-offs because different strategies can facilitate co-existence within communities. A key r...
Plant functional traits directly affect ecosystem functions. At the species level, trait combinations depend on trade-offs representing different ecological strategies, but at the community level trait combinations are expected to be decoupled from these trade-offs because different strategies can facilitate co-existence within communities. A key q...
Policies to mitigate climate change and biodiversity loss often assume that protecting carbon-rich forests provides co-benefits in terms of biodiversity, due to the spatial congruence of carbon stocks and biodiversity at biogeographic scales. However, it remains unclear whether this holds at the scales relevant for management, with particularly lar...
Aim
Biodiversity monitoring and conservation are extremely complex, and surrogate taxa may represent proxies to test methods and solutions. However, cross‐taxon correlations in species diversity (i.e., cross‐taxon congruence) may vary widely with spatial scale. Our goal is to assess how cross‐taxon congruence varies with spatial scale in European t...
Aim
Primary forests have high conservation value but are rare in Europe due to historic land use. Yet many primary forest patches remain unmapped, and it is unclear to what extent they are effectively protected. Our aim was to (1) compile the most comprehensive European‐scale map of currently known primary forests, (2) analyse the spatial determina...
How do structure and function in European old-growth forests compare to other temperate regions? Are old-growth characteristics shared universally or are there regional differences reflecting variation in growth, stand dynamics, and disturbance history? We tested the hypothesis that important ecological functions are provided universally by old-gro...
Habitat loss is the primary cause of local extinctions. Yet, there is considerable uncertainty regarding how fast species respond to habitat loss, and how time‐delayed responses vary in space.
We focused on the Argentine Dry Chaco ( c . 32 million ha), a global deforestation hotspot, and tested for time‐delayed response of bird and mammal communiti...
Plant functional traits directly affect ecosystem functions. At the species level, trait combinations depend on trade-offs representing different ecological strategies, but at the community level trait combinations are expected to be decoupled from these trade-offs because different strategies can facilitate co-existence within communities. A key q...
Questions
Do vascular plant species richness and beta‐diversity differ between managed and structurally complex unmanaged stands? To what extent do species richness and beta‐diversity relate to forest structural attributes and heterogeneity?
Location
Five national parks in central and southern Italy.
Methods
We sampled vascular plant species comp...
Beta-diversity has been repeatedly shown to decline with increasing elevation, but the causes of this pattern remain unclear, partly because they are confounded by coincident variation in alpha- and gamma-diversity. We used 8,795 forest vegetation-plot records from the Czech National Phytosociological Database to compare the observed patterns of be...