The analyses applied in the framework of the present thesis were conducted on a regional scale covering the area of Lower Saxony and Bremen. For this area detailed information on species occurrences and data on environmental conditions and land-scape composition as well as configuration were available.
4Extensive management as applied in traditional cultural (pre-industrial) landscapes, in turn, is known
to be beneficial for biodiversity (EEA, 2004; Angelstam, 2006)
5As applied in Schmiedelet al. (2011, 2013, submitted) and Schmiedel& Culmsee(submitted).
6As applied in Schmiedelet al. (2013) and Schmiedelet al. (submitted).
7As applied in Schmiedelet al. (2013).
If suitable base data are at hand, the methodological approaches applied in the present thesis can be transferred to other – even larger – areas. The most important (and often the rarest) data in this context are area-wide species records. The records need to be reported on a grid- or point-basis8 and have to be of high quality (cp.
subsection 7.3). Additionally, data on land cover and the abiotic environment are needed.
Transferability to Germany and its federal states For most of the federal states of Germany, data comparable to those used in this thesis are available that would allow a transfer. High-resolution data on land cover and topography in this thesis were taken from ATKIS-DLM and ATKIS-DEM (see section 2.2) which are both available for the whole country. Climatic and soil data can be obtained in high resolution for every federal state from the German Weather Service and the regional authori-ties, respectively. Concerning species records, most federal states maintain their own mapping projects (see Table 7.1). The resolutions of these mapping approaches are similar to that used for Lower Saxony or even higher (e. g. c. 8 km2 grid cells for North Rhine-Westphalia, Saxony and Thuringia), the latter enabling even more de-tailed assessments. However, the completeness and reliability of the floristic datasets resulting from these projects would have to be tested before using them in further analyses.
With the distribution atlas of the vascular plants of Germany having been pub-lished recently (NetPhyD & BfN, 2013) reliable data on species occurrences are also available for the whole of Germany. Species data of this database are reported at the same resolution as the data for Lower Saxony (Messtischblatt-Quadranten, 1/4 of a topographical map). Therefore, the methodologies applied in this thesis are directly transferable to the whole country area.
Transferability to European countries Similarly to Germany, most countries in Eu-rope maintain species mapping projects. Out of the projects listed in Table 7.1 for data acquisition only Poland uses a grid less precise than that utilised in this thesis.
All other countries apply more or less equal or even higher resolutions than used in this study. As suggested for species data of the federal states of Germany, prior to an analysis, it needs to be checked whether the available information is reliable and complete.
Additional information on land cover9 and environmental conditions should be available for most European countries and therefore methods might be transferred to these areas as well.
The database of theAtlas Flora Europaea(Jalas& Suominen, 1972-2013) that covers about 20 % of the European flora (FinnishMuseum ofNaturalHistory, 2014)
pro-8Point data can be transferred to grid-based data of varying resolutions.
9For an overview on existing data on land cover in Europe see Manakos& Braun(2014).
Table7.1:OverviewofthelargestdatabasesonthedistributionofvascularplantspeciesinEurope,theirreferenceareas(coverage), resolutionandnumberofentries.ModifiedafterCulmseeetal.(2014,Table6).n/a=notavailable. CoverageResolutionEntriesSource Europe-widemappingproject EuropeaGrid,c.250km2n/abAtlasFloraEuropaeac Country-widemappingprojectsinEurope AustriaGrid,35km2c.1,950,000ProjectMappingtheFloraofAustriad BelgiumGrid,1km2>3,300,000Florabank1database(Landuytetal.,2012) BritishIslesGrid,10km2c.9,800,000BotanicalSocietyoftheBritishIslese DenmarkGrid,25km2>1,000,000DanskBotaniskForeningf FinlandGrid,0.01km2,1km2,100km2c.5,700,000Kasviatlasg GermanyGrid,c.30km2c.30,000,000VerbreitungsatlasderFarn-undBlütenpflanzenDeutschlandsh (NetPhyD&BfN,2013) NetherlandsProvinces,pointcoordinates>10,000,000FLORON,FoundationforfloristicresearchintheNetherlandsi (1989onwards) PolandGrid,100km2>4,500,000ATPOLAtlasofdistributionofvascularplantsinPoland(Za- jac&Zajac,2001) SwitzerlandGrid,1km2c.3,000,000InfoFloraNationaldataandinformationcentreofthefloraof Switzerlandj State-widemappingprojectsinGermany Baden-WürttembergGrid,c.30km2c.1,330,000StateFloristicSurveyk BavariaGrid,c.33km2>1,000,000BavarianFloristicSurveyl LowerSaxonyandBremenGrid,c.30km22,395,045StateInventoryProgramNLWKN(1982–2003),thisthesis Mecklenburg-WestPomeraniaGrid,c.30km2>1,917,600FloraofMecklenburg-WestPomeraniam NorthRhine-WestphaliaGrid,8.4km2c.2,000,000StateInventoryProgram(Haeupleretal.,2003) SaxonyGrid,c.8km2c.1,536,700ProjectFloristicAtlasofSaxony(Hardtke&Ihl,2000) ThuringiaGrid,7.8km2>1,800,000ProjectFloraofThuringia(Korschetal.,2002) aForacompletelistofcountriesseehttp://www.luomus.fi/en/atlas-florae-europaeae-afe-distribution-vascular-plants-europe;b20%oftheEuropeanfloraismapped(FinnishMuseumofNaturalHistory,2014);c http://www.luomus.fi/en/atlas-florae-europaeae-afe-distribution-vascular-plants-europe;dhttp://www.botanik.univie.ac.at/plantchorology/atlases.htm;ehttp://www.bsbi.org.uk;fhttp://www.botaniskforening. dk;ghttp://koivu.luomus.fi/kasviatlas;hhttp://www.deutschlandflora.de;ihttp://www.floron.nl;jhttp://www.infoflora.ch;khttp://www.flora.naturkundemuseum-bw.de;lhttp://www.bayernflora.de;mhttp: //www.flora-mv.de
vides data on species distributions for the whole of Europe on a grid of c. 250 km2, i. e. a resolution much coarser than that used in the present thesis. Moreover, high-resolution data on land cover for the whole area of Europe are not as easy to obtain as for the particular countries. However, information on land cover on this scale could be derived from more coarse-scaled data available for the overall area. 'Corine Land Cover 2006' (EEA, 2013) in this context provides a remote-sensing-derived raster data set on land cover with a pixel size of 100 m×100 m that can be used for research purposes free of charge. Information on topography and climatic conditions available on a resolution of 1 km×1 km can be derived from Worldclim data (Hijmanset al., 2013). Therefore, potentially suitable data are available that could form the basis of analyses similar to that applied in this thesis. Because of the large differences in data resolution the results obtained from such analyses would probably, however, vary largely from those obtained at the regional scale.
Transferability to countries outside Europe The availability of high-resolution plant records for countries outside Europe is limited. However, for some areas, e. g. the state of California, USA (TheCalfloraDatabase, 2014) grid-based species records are acquirable. For other states of the USA (e. g. Alabama, New York, Florida, see Al -abama Herbarium Consortium, 2014; New York Flora Association, 2014; Uni -versity of Florida, Institute for SystematicBotany, 2014) as well as for China (Yanget al., 2013) such information are not available on a grid basis but on county-level only.
Information on species records from other countries unfortunately are very hard to obtain. The transferability of the methods applied in this thesis to areas outside of Europe is therefore limited.