University of Twente Student Theses
Endemic Plant Distribution in Majella National Park, Italy
Chang, Chia-Chi (2010) Endemic Plant Distribution in Majella National Park, Italy.
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| Abstract: | Majella National Park is in the Mediterranean biodiversity hotspots. Its abounding plant and animal resource attracted many researches to come for plant researches, animal researches, topographic researches, climate change researches and others. However, due to the weather, human and short flowering-period limitation, the clear and complete endemic plant taxa geodatabase is still absent, that also causes the distribution of endemic plant taxa is debated. The object of this research is to contribute an understanding of the endemic plant taxa plant distribution in Majella National Park. Because of the limitation of the field work, this research used secondary data from “Data Base Della Flora Vascolare Del Parco Nazionale Della Majella” (Database of the vascular flora of Majella National Park), “Index Seminum” (Index of seed collection) and the research of Romeo Di Pietro in 2008. After pre-processes in ArcGis and ERDAS, a consistent geodatabase was built. In this geodatabase the 4 levels spatial accuracy system of Fabio Conti’s database was used. Considering the spatial accuracy, only the records with level-one and level-two spatial accuracy were used. The resolution of environment parameters was reduced in order to associate with the geodatabases, so cell size was increased to 1Km. This geodatabase is a presence-only geodatabase, and modelling methods were limited. In order to overcome this,the procedures of predicting the distribution maps are data preparing, predicting habitatsuitability maps and predicting distribution maps. Predicting habitat-suitability maps was taken in BioMapper, and predicting distribution maps was taken in the R statistical computing environment with geostatistics (gstat package). The geodatabase shows there are 146 endemic plant taxa in Majella national park, and 70% of them are rare taxa in the world. There are 10 endemic plant taxa selected for further analysis. Though the habitat-suitability model, it shows elevation and NDVI are the best explanatory environmental parameters, and most of endemic plant taxa tend to grow in the high elevation part and open vegetation. Comparing the results of habitat-suitability maps from ENFA and distribution maps from Indicator kiging, in the core habitat the result is similar, but in other parts the habitat-suitability maps seem to be a too optimistic prediction. However, large geodatabases are required to confirm the distribution pattern and its reasons. |
| Item Type: | Essay (Master) |
| Faculty: | ITC: Faculty of Geo-information Science and Earth Observation |
| Subject: | 43 environmental science |
| Programme: | Geoinformation Science and Earth Observation MSc (75014) |
| Link to this item: | https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/90720 |
| Export this item as: | BibTeX EndNote HTML Citation Reference Manager |
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