Grasslands and other open vegetation types cover an enormous share of the Palaearctic biogeographic realm, which stretches across Europe, northern Africa and Asia north of the Himalaya. Within this realm the steppe biome alone covers roughly 10.5 million square kilometres, making it one of the largest continuous ecosystems on Earth. Yet a new editorial in the journal Vegetation Classification and Survey shows that scientists’ ability to describe and classify this vegetation in a consistent way remains strikingly uneven, with Europe far ahead of Asia and northern Africa in producing rigorous, plot-based classification studies.
The editorial, written by an international team of vegetation scientists, introduces a Special Collection on the classification of grasslands and other open vegetation types in the Palaearctic. The collection was initiated by the Eurasian Dry Grassland Group, a working group of the International Association for Vegetation Science, and follows two earlier such initiatives published in Applied Vegetation Science and Phytocoenologia.
To gauge the state of research, the authors conducted a bibliometric search in the Web of Science Core Collection on 22 December 2021, using the search terms “classification” and “grassland”, and additionally “classification” and “steppe”, and excluding studies from outside the Palaearctic. They found a total of 207 studies published between 1972 and 2021. Of these, 106 were typical plot-based classification studies, mostly following the phytosociological method. The overwhelming majority of these, 98 works, concerned Europe or European regions. Only seven took place in the Asian part of Russia, with still fewer in Middle Asia (four), Iran (three) and northern Africa (one).
The bibliometric analysis also revealed two other prominent approaches. A second body of work, 50 papers, relied on remote sensing rather than field-sampled plot data. Although such classifications are not based on high-quality phytodiversity data sampled in plots, the authors note that they can serve as a valuable tool for higher-level classification of extended areas of Asia or Africa and can help identify gaps for further detailed field surveys; these remote sensing studies mainly originated from China. A third, practical and agricultural approach, represented by 17 studies, classified grasslands according to their value as pasture for livestock. A further 32 classification studies could not be assigned to any of these three approaches. The number of publications in recent years was stable to slightly increasing, with a downward trend in typical phytosociological studies, which the authors suggest may be related to the completion of many projects in already well-researched areas and to publication in journals not covered by the Web of Science. They caution that these observed trends offer only a limited picture, since many relevant journals and monographs are not included in the Web of Science statistics.
Europe’s head start reflects a long tradition of vegetation classification, although some regions in the east and north of the continent were historically less studied. Even in countries without a phytosociological tradition, such as Bulgaria, Ukraine and European Russia, intensive attempts to inventory vegetation types phytosociologically have taken place during the last 30 years, producing thousands of local and regional classification studies of grasslands and other open habitats. Comprehensive national and regional overviews followed, first based solely on literature reviews, and later, with the advent of national vegetation-plot databases, on the statistical analysis of tens of thousands of computerised relevés, yielding typologies that are far more reproducible than in the past. However, the authors emphasise that these independent and uncoordinated efforts also led to inconsistent typologies from which it is hard to extract a general picture.
Two recent developments have begun to change that. The EuroVegChecklist, a multi-author enterprise evolving over approximately one decade, is the first consistent and comprehensive overview of all higher-level syntaxa, meaning alliances, orders and classes, in Europe, although it is based exclusively on literature reviews rather than on the analysis of plot data. In parallel, the European Vegetation Archive has compiled a comprehensive vegetation-plot database of the continent and some adjacent regions, such as Turkey, Cyprus and the Caucasus countries, now holding more than 1.9 million vegetation plots. Before its release there had been only very few attempts to classify particular vegetation types at a subcontinental or continental scale using a common dataset. Since then, an increasing number of open habitat types have been classified at subcontinental scale, including saline communities of Southeast Europe, wet tall-herb grasslands and acidophilous alpine grasslands of the Iberian Peninsula, mesic grasslands of Western and Central Europe, dry grasslands of the Festuco-Brometea class in Central and Eastern Europe, and Mediterranean cliff and Lygeum spartum grasslands. More recently, the first pan-European studies based on the archive have appeared, mostly focusing on specialised or relatively rare open vegetation types. By contrast, continental syntheses of the large and diverse grassland classes such as Molinio-Arrhenatheretea, Festuco-Brometea, Koelerio-Corynephoretea and Elyno-Seslerietea are still missing, probably because of the huge effort required to prepare datasets with tens of thousands of plots and thousands of species. A top-down, supervised classification for all European vegetation types has, however, recently become available as a good first approximation, and distribution maps of all European vegetation alliances have been published.
The situation in the Asian part of the Palaearctic is far more heterogeneous, owing to the vast area and the different methodological traditions involved. The authors highlight the lack of consistent continental syntheses dedicated to particular vegetation types. Vegetation survey in the Asian part of Russia has accelerated in recent years, with dozens of classification papers published in the journal Vegetation of Russia between 2001 and 2010, and a national programme aims to publish a multi-volume summary of the country’s vegetation diversity by 2027, with surveys of tundra deserts and alpine vegetation planned by 2025, steppe and meadow vegetation by 2026 and halophytic vegetation by 2027. Yet vast areas of arctic tundra in Yakutia, Chukotka, Taymyria, Kolyma and Yamal, alpine grasslands in several mountain ranges, and meadows and tall-forb communities in parts of Siberia and the Russian Far East remain unclassified. Regional phytosociological studies have been published mainly for Turkey and Iran, while many other countries of Southwest Asia, including the Caucasus countries, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and the whole Arab Peninsula, remain, to the authors’ knowledge, without in-depth phytosociological studies using modern approaches. In Middle Asia, recent treatments cover the steppes of central and northern Kazakhstan, and the grasslands of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan are relatively well studied, but hardly anything is known about the typology of grasslands in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. China has started an attempt to classify the vegetation of the whole country, but because it uses an idiosyncratic approach and results are published mainly in Chinese, the outcomes are hardly usable for a pan-Palaearctic overview; a notable recent exception is a comprehensive, plot-based classification of all Stipa-dominated steppes across China, based on more than a thousand relevés. Japan has a strong phytosociological tradition, but most works date from the previous century and are in Japanese, while the two Koreas have only few classification studies of open vegetation.
Northern Africa fares worst of all. Up to now there are only relatively few and geographically restricted classification studies, for example on deserts and salt marshes in Egypt and mountain vegetation in Algeria, although some recent syntheses of Mediterranean grassland types have included North African data. The editorial’s authors hope that the recent foundation of African and Asian Regional Sections of the International Association for Vegetation Science will stimulate development of classification systems that are consistent across broad scales.
The seven articles of the Special Collection themselves illustrate both the progress and the remaining gaps. Four are regional studies of specific vegetation types. Seiler and colleagues classified small springs in Park Ela in Grisons, Switzerland, showing through careful sampling of vascular plants and bryophytes that this habitat, often considered species-poor, is anything but, and contributing to planned revisions of the class Montio-Cardaminetea in Europe. Magnes and colleagues studied the inneralpine dry grasslands of Austria, showing that they are better described by three floristically and ecologically differentiated orders of meso-xeric, xeric and rocky grasslands than by the older two-order concept, and identifying hotspots of biodiversity in a cultural landscape of the inner-alpine valleys. Świerkosz and Raczyńska classified montane to subalpine tall-forb vegetation in the Sudetes Mountains of Poland, analysing 399 relevés and distinguishing nine association-level units in four alliances, producing a classification for western Poland that matches the EuroVegChecklist. Shapoval and Kuzemko studied steppe depressions, so-called pody, in south-eastern Ukraine; based on 641 relevés they presented nine vegetation types, clarified the placement of this vegetation in the European syntaxonomic system, validated eight syntaxa, and described two associations and two subassociations as new to science.
Two further studies offer broader syntheses, and one analyses biodiversity patterns. Nowak and colleagues conducted the first study of the highly diverse tall-forb vegetation of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, distinguishing 13 associations and five communities at association level from 244 relevés, assigned to the class Prangetea ulopterae. García-Mijangos and colleagues revised the grassland classification of Navarre in northern Spain based on 839 relevés, starting with an unsupervised TWINSPAN classification and deriving from it an electronic expert system at four hierarchical levels, from class down to association, that will allow unambiguous classification of future relevés; they recognised only five clearly separated classes, significantly fewer than in previous overviews, and showed that bryophytes and lichens are core elements with high diagnostic value in Mediterranean grasslands. Finally, Dembicz and colleagues used nested-plot data from the GrassPlot database to analyse fine-grain beta diversity, measured as the z-value of the power-law species-area relationship, across open vegetation types of the Palaearctic. While variability of z-values was large within phytosociological classes, vegetation types and biomes, the large dataset allowed the detection of significant differences: Alpine and Mediterranean vegetation types had above-average z-values, while managed grasslands with benign soil and climate conditions and saline communities had particularly low values. The systematic classification and inventory of plant communities, the authors conclude, provide an important reference system for studying and forecasting processes in the biosphere driven in part by climate change and land use change, and modern classification systems can serve as a common language for scientists and practitioners formulating ecosystem-related management decisions.
Subject of Research: Classification of grasslands and other open vegetation types across the Palaearctic biogeographic realm
Article Title: Classification of grasslands and other open vegetation types in the Palaearctic – Introduction to the Special Collection
Article References: Nowak, A., Biurrun, I., Janišová, M., & Dengler, J. (2022). Classification of grasslands and other open vegetation types in the Palaearctic – Introduction to the Special Collection. Vegetation Classification and Survey, 3, 149-159. https://doi.org/10.3897/vcs.87068
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: 10.3897/VCS.87068
Keywords: grasslands, vegetation classification, Palaearctic, phytosociology, European Vegetation Archive, steppe, biodiversity, Eurasian Dry Grassland Group, plant communities, syntaxonomy, GrassPlot, vegetation science
News Source: Margaret Porter. (October 27, 2026). Mapping a Continent’s Grasslands: New Special Collection Classifies Palaearctic Open Vegetation. Scienmag.
