Taxon‐level assessment of the data collection quality in Atlas Florae Europaeae: insights from the case of Rosa (Rosaceae) in Eastern Europe

Anatoliy A Khapugin,Alexey V Kravchenko,Vladimir M Vasjukov,Lyudmila V Teteryuk,Dmitriy V Dubovik,Anna Sołtys‐Lelek,Irina O Buzunova,Alexander N Sennikov,Nikolay M Fedoronchuk,Elena S Kazmina,Olga G Baranova,Andrey V Yena,Vladimir A Agafonov,Zigmantas Gudžinskas,Toomas Kukk,Albert A Muldashev,Mikhail N Kozhin

doi:10.1111/njb.03289

Abstract

By the method of data re‐collection and re‐assessment, we here test the completeness of distribution areas of the species and species aggregates of Rosa in Eastern Europe as mapped in volume 13 of Atlas Florae Europaeae (AFE), and discuss insights into the issues connected with the data. We found many new occurrences which are additions to the published maps: 1068 records of species and 570 records of species aggregates. The new occurrences are listed with references to the sources, and the updated AFE maps are provided. The greatest increase by new native occurrences was revealed for the species that are widespread or taxonomically complicated, and by new alien occurrences for the species that currently expand their secondary distribution areas. The mapping work published in 2004 is considered good, with minor omissions caused by possible oversights and incomplete sampling. The majority of new additions originated in the period after the original data collection. Nearly the same amount of new data originated from larger and smaller herbarium collections, underlining the value of small collections for chorological studies. We found that only ca 20% of new records based on herbarium specimens have been published, thus highlighting the need for data papers for publication of distributional data. The greatest increase by new records based on herbarium specimens was found for insufficiently studied territories (Belarus, central, northern and eastern parts of Russia), whereas the same level of increase for the territories with reasonably good coverage (Latvia) was achieved by observations. We conclude that the overall sparsity of published records in Eastern Europe is caused by a lower level of data collection rather than by poor data availability, and that floristic surveys based on herbarium specimens cannot compete in speed and density of records with observation‐based surveys, which may become the main source of distributional information in the future.

Highlights

Atlas Florae Europaeae (AFE) is an ongoing project on largescale grid mapping of vascular plants, which aims at compiling distribution maps of native and established alien occurrences of all vascular plants in Europe based on the UTM grid with a cell size of approx. 50 × 50 km ()
In this study we focused exclusively on the background data, which is the documentation for any mapping work, because the data behind published outline distribution areas (Meusel et al 1965, Sokolov et al 1980, Hultén and Fries 1986), deemed complete and accurate at the time of publication, may be outdated and biased by assumptions, extrapolations and inaccuracies of the old paperwork style
The aims of the present study were as follows: 1) verification of species distributions of Rosa in Eastern Europe and Poland, according to the grid mapping scheme of AFE; 2) collection of new occurrences of these species, complementing the distribution areas published in AFE; 3) assessing the magnitude and spatial distribution of the imperfections in the AFE data collection process, and the reasons for these imperfections

Summary

Introduction

Atlas Florae Europaeae (AFE) is an ongoing project on largescale grid mapping of vascular plants, which aims at compiling distribution maps of native and established alien occurrences of all vascular plants in Europe based on the UTM grid with a cell size of approx. 50 × 50 km (). Its launch dated back to the 1960s when this project was designed as a technical complement to Flora Europaea and served as a tool for taxonomic and nomenclatural updates and improvements of the distributional data (Suominen 1973). (Kurtto et al 2018), AFE embraced the taxonomic data on the European Rosaceae Juss., which were originally published in volume 2 of Flora Europaea (Tutin et al 1968). The mapping of this large family, which required extensive taxonomic rearrangements and nomenclatural updates in some groups (e.g. Sorbus s.l.; Sennikov and Kurtto 2017), lasted for over 15 years and resulted in five bulky volumes (Kurtto et al 2004, 2007, 2010, 2013, 2018). The project has covered ca 25% of the European vascular plant flora

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