Taxonomic Diversity of Vascular Plants in the European Alpine Areas

Using a relatively broad species concept, Flora Europaea describes about 11,500 native species (Tutin et al.1964, 1968-1980). The richest areas are around the Alps, Pyrenees and the Balkan Peninsula, where altitudinal zonation results in diverse habitats with many different species or subspecies within small areas (Ozenda 1983; Lahti and Lampinen 1999;Williams et al. 2000). Although there have been previous attempts to understand the relationships and hence the history of the mountain systems in Europe, a comprehensive analysis by comparing mountain ranges across Europe is difficult. The distribution data are compiled in various local floras that use administrative or political boundaries rather than natural biogeographical divisions. Moreover, workers at different times, even in similar areas, have used different species concepts, thus making comparisons difficult. As a new initiative, we examine here the richness and distribution of European alpine species using data from the first 11 volumes of Atlas Florae Europaeae (AFE). AFE (Jalas et al.1996) provides individual maps for more than 3000 vascular plant taxa from Lycopodiaceae to Brassicaceae, covering about 20% of all taxa treated in the five volumes of Flora Europaea. What makes this particular analysis possible is that these data have been digitised recently, enabling the use of the necessary diversity measures and area-selection analyses of alpine taxa using the WORLDMAP software (Humphries et al. 1999;Lahti and Lampinen 1999; Williams et al.2000).