Publications by authors named "Sabina Burrascano"

Balancing increasing demand for wood products while also maintaining forest biodiversity is a paramount challenge. Europe's Biodiversity and Forest Strategies for 2030 attempt to address this challenge. Together, they call for strict protection of 10% of land area, including all primary and old growth forests, increasing use of ecological forestry, and less reliance on monocultural plantations.

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Article Synopsis
  • The 'Global Spectrum of Plant Form and Function Dataset' includes mean values for six key vascular plant traits, essential for understanding plant variation.
  • This dataset aggregates around 1 million trait records from the TRY database and other sources, encompassing 92,159 species mean values across 46,047 species.
  • Comprehensive data quality management and validation ensure this is the largest and most reliable collection of empirical data on vascular plant traits available.
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Monitoring semi-natural grasslands is difficult and costly because they occur in highly dynamic and extremely complex habitat mosaics. We combined the use of a low-cost unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and Structure from Motion (SfM) photogrammetry to acquire high spatial resolution (∼1.5 cm pixel) RGB imagery.

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Aim: Understanding the variation in community composition and species abundances (i.e., β-diversity) is at the heart of community ecology.

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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.

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Article Synopsis
  • Plant traits, which include various characteristics like morphology and physiology, play a crucial role in how plants interact with their environment and impact ecosystems, making them essential for research in areas like ecology, biodiversity, and environmental management.
  • The TRY database, established in 2007, has become a vital resource for global plant trait data, promoting open access and enabling researchers to identify and fill data gaps for better ecological modeling.
  • Although the TRY database provides extensive data, there are significant areas lacking consistent measurements, particularly for continuous traits that vary among individuals in their environments, presenting a major challenge that requires collaboration and coordinated efforts to address.
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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, and particularly large knowledge gaps exist for temperate forests and for taxa other than trees. We built a comprehensive dataset of Central European temperate forest structure and multi-taxonomic diversity (beetles, birds, bryophytes, fungi, lichens, and plants) across 352 plots.

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Different assembly processes may simultaneously affect local-scale variation of species composition in temperate old-growth forests. Ground layer species diversity reflects chance colonization and persistence of low-dispersal species, as well as fine-scale environmental heterogeneity. The latter depends on both purely abiotic factors, such as soil properties and topography, and factors primarily determined by overstorey structure, such as light availability.

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