
Jürgen DenglerZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences | ZHAW · Institute of Natural Resource Sciences (IUNR)
Jürgen Dengler
Prof. Dr. rer. nat. habil.
Working on a new edition of the Ecological Indicator Values for Europe (EIVE) and several studies on vegetation change
About
839
Publications
440,981
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Introduction
I am a vegetation ecologist, with excellent species knowledge in the field, who in recent years strongly "invaded" into macroecology and ecoinformatics. My basic research interest are the patterns of biodiversity and their underlying causes, with a special focus on ecological scaling-laws such as species-area relationships. A second research focus is conservation of biodiversity, where I work both on conceptual issues and practical solutions in conservation, management and restoration.
Additional affiliations
Education
November 2007 - April 2012
October 1994 - February 2003
April 1991 - June 1994
Publications
Publications (839)
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 contai...
Question : We explored the error resulting from different methods for recording the cover of plants in vegetation plots, specifically the direct estimation of percent cover vs. the use of ordinal cover scales (7-step Braun-Blanquet and 5-step Hult-Sernander-Du Rietz). Methods : We simulated 121 plant species of different cover, sampled with 13 diff...
Aims: Developing a hierarchical classification system for classes, orders and alliances of the diverse dry grasslands of the Central and Eastern Balkan Peninsula and translating this into an electronic expert system (ES) for the automatic assignment of plots.
Location: Serbia, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Bulgaria and northern Greece.
Methods: We extra...
This article aims to quantitatively assess how different formal aspects – beyond the relevance and quality of a study – influence how often a scientific paper is cited. As a case study, I retrieved all publications co-authored by myself from the Scopus database, of which 174 could be used for regression modelling. The citation impact was quantified...
Aims: To provide the first syntaxonomic scheme of the main natural and semi-natural steppic vegetation types along a 3000-m elevational gradient. Location: South-facing slopes of Mt. Damavand, Iran. Methods: A dataset of 330 phytosociological plots of 25 m² sampled in all main vegetation types of the region was subjected to unsupervised classificat...
In the inneralpine dry valleys of Valais (Switzerland), irrigation is a centuries-old practice to increase productivity in semi-natural grasslands. In recent decades, the traditional irrigation by so-called Suonen (small water channels) has been replaced increasingly by irrigation with sprinklers. To investigate the long-term effects of sprinkler i...
Vegetation ecologists use a wide range of importance (“abundance”) measures for plant species in vegetation plots, including percentage cover, ordinal cover scales, frequency and fractional biomass. Resurvey studies and analyses of heterogenous data from large vegetation-plot databases need to deal with data sampled with different approaches, yet v...
We compiled a list of the known maxima of vascular plant species richness in the steppe zone of Ukraine at different sampling scales (0.0001-100 m²) and compared them with the world records. Detailed information on each of the identified species-rich grassland plots is provided, including site descriptions, plot characteristics, coordinates, and sp...
Members of the Eurasian Dry Grassland Group (EDGG) and its predecessor organizations have been publishing grassland Special Features in Tuexenia since 2005. This year's Special Feature includes five articles highlighting different aspects of grassland research: Riedel et al. (2024) compared cover-and biomass-based methods for recording the abundanc...
This editorial introduces the Special Collection of “African Vegetation Studies”. The collection includes seven research papers from four African countries. One paper examines the impact of traditional agro-ecosystems on plant diversity in Morocco. In Benin, one research paper focuses on vegetation associations in a biosphere reserve, and another i...
The Eurasian Dry Grassland Group (EDGG) has developed a rigorous sampling methodology aimed at comprehensively documenting plant diversity across non-forest habitats in the Palaearctic realm. During the 18 th EDGG Field Workshop devoted to the dry grasslands in the Southwestern Alps, three annual vascular plant species not observed in the Aosta Val...
With this contribution, we would like to invite owners of data conforming with the GrassPlot quality standards to contribute them to GrassPlot and join our consortium. Being part of the consortium involves becoming invited to Grass-Plot paper projects using your data and at the same time being entitled to access the full GrassPlot database for your...
The EDGG Field Workshops are research expeditions dedi-cated to the acquisition of high-quality data on Palaearctic non-forest vegetation types, following a standardized meth-odology (Dengler et al. 2016). Participants are engaged in vegetation-plot sampling, documenting all encountered vascular plant, bryophyte, and lichen species, as well as key...
Plant communities are composed of species that differ both in functional traits and evolutionary histories. As species’ functional traits partly result from their individual evolutionary history, we expect the functional diversity of communities to increase with increasing phylogenetic diversity. This expectation has only been tested at local scale...
During a recent expedition of the Eurasian Dry Grassland Group in the steppes of southern Ukraine, we discovered on sand dunes a new sterile crustose aspicilioid lichen with rhizomorphs. It is described here as new to science under the name Circinaria ucrainica ( Megasporaceae ). The new combination Circinaria reptans (Looman) Khodos. & Darmostuk i...
Questions
Semi‐natural grasslands in Southern Europe are biodiversity hotspots, yet their patterns of plant species richness are less studied than in Central Europe. In the Central Apennines (Italy), there are large areas of dry calcareous grasslands, across a steep gradient of mean annual precipitation (from 650 to 1350 mm within c. 30 km). We ask...
Since 2019, the IUNR and the University of Warsaw are organising a joint Master Summer School, alternating between Switzerland and Poland, while later the Kherson State University in Southern Ukraine has joined as a third partner. In August 2024, we were hosted for the second time by the Geobotanical Field Station of the University of Warsaw, locat...
The Ecological Indicator Values for Europe (EIVE) 1.0 were released in January 2023 and are the hitherto most comprehensive ecological indicator value (EIV) system for Europe. They comprise the assessment of the five main niche dimensions (moisture, nitrogen, reaction, light, temperature) for almost 15,000 vascular plant taxa. EIVE was constructed...
Aims
The accurate classification of habitats is essential for effective biodiversity conservation. The goal of this study was to harness the potential of deep learning to advance habitat identification in Europe. We aimed to develop and evaluate models capable of assigning vegetation‐plot records to the habitats of the European Nature Information S...
After a nomenclatural revision of the available names for the order of rocky grasslands of the Balkan Peninsula within the class Festuco-Brometea, based on Article 52 ICPN we propose the conservation of the name Koelerietalia splendentis against the name Halacsyetalia sendtneri. In syntaxonomic concepts not combining the limestone and serpentine ro...
While sampling the vegetation of the semi-natural grasslands with the EDGG standard methodology on the Swedish island of Gotland, the terricolous lichen species Cladonia homosekikaica Nuno from the C. pyxidata-chlorophaea complex was found in 2022. This is the first record of this species from Sweden. We provide here detailed information on its dif...
This Long Database Report describes the historical background and current contents of the Nordic-Baltic Grassland Vegetation Database (NBGVD) (GIVD-code EU-00-002). NBGVD is the EDGG-associated collaborative vegetation-plot database that collects vegetation-plot data of grasslands and other open habitats (except segetal and deep aquatic vegetation)...
Aim: To provide the first syntaxonomic, plot-based classification of the dry grasslands and thorn-cushion communities in Armenia. Study area: Armenia. Methods: We sampled 111 vegetation plots (10 m²) and recorded environmental and structural parameters. We collected additional 487 relevés from surrounding countries for a broad-scale comparison. We...
Aims: We introduce ReSurveyEurope — a new data source of resurveyed vegetation
plots in Europe, compiled by a collaborative network of vegetation scientists. We describe
the scope of this initiative, provide an overview of currently available data,
governance, data contribution rules, and accessibility. In addition, we outline further
steps, includ...
Increasing nitrogen depositions adversely affect European landscapes, including habitats within the Natura2000 network. Critical loads for nitrogen deposition have been established to quantify the loss of habitat quality. When the nitrogen deposition rises above a habitat-specific critical load, the quality of the focal habitat is expected to be ne...
Terrestrial ecosystems affect climate by reflecting solar irradiation, evaporative cooling,
and carbon sequestration. Yet very little is known about how plant traits affect climate
regulation processes (CRPs) in different habitat types. Here, we used linear and
random forest models to relate the community-weighted
mean and variance values
of 19 pla...
The first comprehensive phytosociological classification of all vegetation types in Europe (EuroVegChecklist; Applied Vegetation Science, 2016, 19, 3-264) contained brief descriptions of each type. However, these descriptions were not standardized and mentioned only the most distinct features of each vegetation type. The practical application of th...
On the occasion of the completion of the fourth volume of Vegetation Classification and Survey (VCS), we have analysed the performance of the journal since its inception. The number of papers and pages show a moderate increase over the years. VCS has been included in the Scopus database for more than a year and received its first CiteScore of 2.0 i...
Aims: The Raunkiaer's system classifies vascular plants into life forms based on the position of renewal buds during periods unfavourable for plant growth. Despite the importance of Raunkiaer's system for ecological research, a study exploring the diversity and distribution of life forms on a continental scale is missing. We aim to (i) map the dive...
Publication and citation numbers, citation rates and normalized citation rates 2020–2023 as well as some current citation metrics from Scopus and Web of Science for the 30 ecological journals compared in this study.
The relationship between phylogenetic diversity (PD) and functional diversity (FD) is important for understanding the mechanisms of community assembly. The traditional view assumes a coupled (positively correlated) relationship between these two diversity measures, suggesting that competitive exclusion and environmental filtering are important driv...
Dear members of the GrassPlot Consortium, With this second Newsletter of this year, we would like to update you on recent developments of our database. Not overly much has happened in the past half of a year, which was a busy field season for all of us like probably most of you. However, stay tuned for many upcoming exciting new paper projects, whi...
At the annual Summer School organized by the IUNR, the University of Warsaw (Poland) and the Kherson State University (Ukraine), an international group of students can explore advanced methods for surveying and monitoring biodiversity, alternating between two permanent study sites in Switzerland and Poland. In 2023, the Summer School returned to Pa...
from the strong push of science funders towards gold open access (OA). This has given rise to numerous “predatory” journals, that maximise profit at the expense of scientific quality. With a bibliometric analysis in the field of ecology I demonstrate that over the period 2014–2022 the publication numbers in “predatory” OA journals have grown expone...
The class Montio-Cardaminetea includes vegetation of springs with constant water flow. These habitats, which function as islands for highly specialized and sensitive biota, are endangered by ongoing landscape and climatic changes. Although a harmonized classification into vegetation units is necessary for effective habitat conservation, there is cu...
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...
Grasslands host a significant share of Europe’s species diversity but are among the most threatened vegetation types of the continent. Resurvey studies can help to understand patterns and drivers of changes in grassland diversity and species composition. However, most resurveys are based on local or regional data, and hardly reach back more than ei...
In der Schweiz gibt es 42 eidgenössische Jagdbanngebiete. Ein wichtiges Ziel dieser Gebiete ist der Schutz und die Erhaltung von Säugetieren und Vögeln und ihrer Lebensräume (Verordnung über die eidgenössischen Jagdbanngebiete, Art. 1, Stand 2015). Das Jagdbanngebiet «Graue Hörner» im Kanton St. Gallen bietet vielen Tier- und Pflanzenarten weitgehe...
Ecological theory posits that temporal stability patterns in plant populations are associated with differences in species' ecological strategies. However, empirical evidence is lacking about which traits, or trade-offs, underlie species stability, especially across different biomes. We compiled a worldwide collection of long-term permanent vegetati...