The role of landscape, topography, and geodiversity in explaining vascular plant species richness in a fragmented landscape

Abstract

We explained vascular plant species richness patterns in a 286 km2 fragmented landscape with a notable human influence. The objective of this study was two-fold: to test the relative importance of landscape, topography and geodiversity measures, and to compare three different landscape-type variables in species richness modeling. Moreover, we tested if results differ when only native species are considered. We used generalized linear modeling based variation partitioning and generalized additive models with different explanatory variable sets. Landscape and topography explained the majority of the variation but the relative importance of topography and geodiversity was higher in explaining native species richness than in explaining total species richness. Differences between the three landscape type variables were small and they provided complementary information. Finally, topography and geodiversity often direct human action and can be ultimate causes behind both landscape variability and species richness patterns.