Mapping six decades of vascular plant species richness change across Europe

GIS
machine learning
data visualization
ShinyApp
R Shiny dashboard mapping species richness dynamics
Published

July 21, 2025

App link: gmidolo.shinyapps.io/interpolated_s_change_app

We interpolated spatiotemporal changes in vascular plant species richness between 1960 and 2020 using Random Forests. Training and predictions are obtained over 660,748 European vegetation plots available on the European Vegetation Archive (Chytrý et al. 2020) and ReSurveyEurope (Knollová et al. 2024).

Predictions of species richness from individual plots were aggregated onto a 10 km × 10 km grid. On the map, point size represents the number of plots within each grid cell. Areas with denser sampling in space and time are more likely to show more accurate trends.

Preprint paper: Midolo et al. (2025) Six decades of losses and gains in alpha diversity of European plant communities EcoEvoRxiv https://doi.org/10.32942/X2164H

App code : gmidolo/interpolated_S_change_app