Damasceno, G. | bioRxiv Science

bioRxiv2025

From smartphones to satellites: Uniting crowdsourced biodiversity monitoring and Earth observation to fill the gaps in global plant trait mapping

Plant functional traits are fundamental to ecosystem dynamics and Earth system processes, but their global characterization is limited by the availability of field surveys and trait measurements. Recent expansions in biodiversity data aggregation, including large collections of vegetation surveys, citizen science observations, and trait measurements, offer new opportunities to overcome these constraints. Here we demonstrate that combining these diverse data sources with high-resolution Earth observation data enables accurate modeling of key plant traits at up to 1 km resolution. Our approach achieves high predictive power, reaching correlations up to 0.63 (15 of 31 traits exceeding 0.50) and improved spatial transferability, effectively bridging gaps in under-sampled regions. By capturing a broad range of traits with high spatial coverage, these maps can enhance our understanding of plant community properties and ecosystem functioning globally, and can serve as useful tools in modeling global biogeochemical processes and informing worldwide conservation efforts. Ultimately, our framework highlights the power and necessity of crowdsourced biodiversity data in high-resolution plant trait modeling. We anticipate that advancements in biodiversity data collection and remote sensing capabilities will further refine global trait mapping, fostering a dynamic trait-based understanding of the biosphere.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2024

Land-use impacts on plant functional diversity throughout Europe

AimGlobal biodiversity loss resulting from anthropogenic land-use activities is a pressing concern, requiring precise assessments of impacts at large spatial extents. Existing models mainly focus on species richness and abundance, lacking insights into ecological mechanisms and species roles in ecosystem functioning. To bridge this gap, we conducted an extensive analysis of the impact of human land use on vascular plant functional diversity, across diverse land-use classes and bioregions in Europe, comparing it to traditional metrics. Location: Europe Time period: 1992-2019 Major taxa studied: Vascular plants MethodsIntegrating extensive databases of vegetation plots with spatial data on land use and land cover, we paired plots from areas actively used and modified by humans with plots from natural habitats under similar environmental conditions. Using species occurrences and traits, in each plot we computed three complementary functional diversity metrics (functional richness, evenness, and divergence), species richness and abundance. We assessed the impact of land use by comparing the metrics in the paired plots. ResultsOur findings revealed that, compared to natural habitats, anthropogenic land use exhibits lower functional richness and divergence but higher functional evenness across most land-use classes and bioregions. The response of functional richness was more marked than the other two metrics and especially pronounced in croplands and urban areas and in northern bioregions. Functional richness exhibited a pattern that did not fully overlap with the trend in species richness, providing useful complementary information. Main conclusionsWe provide a large-scale precise assessment of anthropogenic land-use impacts on functional diversity across Europe. Our findings indicate that: (i) human disturbance significantly alters plant functional diversity compared to natural habitats; (ii) this alteration goes in the direction of functional homogenization; (i) functional diversity metrics complement traditional metrics by offering deeper insights into the ecological mechanisms in response to anthropogenic land use.

ecology↗