🌳 Botanist | Vegetation ecologist
🌿 Editor-in-Chief of Vegetation Ecology and Diversity (VED)
📚 Senior researcher @University of Siena, Italy
🔎 https://www.gianmariabonari.com/
Gianmaria Bonari
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The Iberian Peninsula is a particularly interesting region for Scots pine: it marks the edge of its range, and its forests have undergone major changes since the end of the last Ice Age.
Gianmaria Bonari
One of the most interesting outcomes is that, according to climate models, present‑day conditions should actually allow Scots pine forests to occupy a much wider area than they currently do.
In this study, we wanted to better understand how diverse these forests really are, how they are shaped by environmental conditions, and how their distribution has changed over time.
Understanding the long‑term history and ecological diversity of these forests is crucial—not only for biogeography, but also for conservation and forest management, especially in the context of ongoing climate change.
Yet, both modern data and fossil records tell a different story: today’s distribution is far more restricted. This strong mismatch points to the long‑lasting impact of historical human pressures, highlighting that climate alone cannot explain the current patterns we see.
This allowed us to identify four major types of native Scots pine forests, each with its own ecological character and plant communities, often including endemic and relict species.
🌲 Native Pinus sylvestris forests in the Iberian Peninsula: a more complex history than expected
📄 The article is open access:
👉 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Happy to share our new paper led by Victor Gonzalez Garcia, just published in the Journal of Biogeography, that explores the diversity, ecology and post‑glacial history of native Pinus sylvestris (Scots pine) forests at the south‑western limit of the species’ global distribution.
To do this, we brought together 1,299 vegetation plots from across the Peninsula and combined classical vegetation analysis with ecosystem distribution models and palaeobotanical evidence.
