Current knowledge and phytosociological data on the high-altitude vegetation in the Western Carpathians — a review

Abstract

Presented survey summarizes the results of the studies published predominantly after 2000, dealing with the plant communities around and above the timberline in (montane) subalpine to alpine (subnival) belt of the Western Carpathians. All of these communities underwent a critical syntaxonomical and nomenclatorical revision, hence the demonstrated overview of high-mountain vegetation of Western Carpathians (mostly from Slovakia, less from Poland border areas) represent the current state of knowledge. The high-altitude vegetation database, which is the part of Slovak National Vegetation Database, SNVD (http://ibot.sav.sk/cdf/index.html), incorporated 8,160 published releves on 15 May 2007 (of the total of 30,469 published releves in the SNVD). Concerning the unpublished releves, the individual authors have provided more than 18,400 of them to be stored in SNVD; 2,301 of all unpublished releves could be assigned to high-altitude vegetation. Mountain and alpine vegetation is in SNVD presented by 15 classes; the most frequent class is Mulgedio-Aconitetea. With its quantity and also the quality of releves, the high-altitude database, as well as the whole SNVD, represents the unique database within Slovakia, which provides information not only about the locality, floristic composition and variability of individual vegetation types, but also about several environmental variables such as inclination, aspect, geology or soil type, characteristic for individual releves. Together with other Central European databases, SNVD takes up the leading position in Europe.