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Vegetation patterns and primary succession on sea-born volcanic islands (Santorini archipelago, Aegean Sea, Greece)
Journal article   Peer reviewed

Vegetation patterns and primary succession on sea-born volcanic islands (Santorini archipelago, Aegean Sea, Greece)

Panayotis Dimopoulos, Thomas Raus, Ladislav Mucina and Ioannis Tsiripidis
Phytocoenologia, Vol.40(1), pp.1-14
2010
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1127/0340-269X/2010/0040-0426
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Abstract

halo-nitrophilous scrub Mediterranean vegetation ordination tephra therophytic vegetation vegetation dynamics Kameni islands volcano
Santorini (S Cyclades, Greece) is one of the active volcanoes of the South Aegean volcanic arc, with more than 12 major eruptions during the past 250,000 years. Our research, using a set of 93 phytosociological relevés, focused on the two volcanic islands of Palea Kameni (PK) and Nea Kameni (NK), differing in age and history of vegetation development. Numerical classification techniques were used to define plant communities, and Redundancy Analysis (RDA) was used to investigate the main environmental gradients and identify the explanatory variables with a unique significant contribution to the explanation of the communities’ floristic composition. In RDA environmental factors such as altitude, slope inclination, relief, aspect, age of geological substrate, distance from the shore, and selected Ellenberg Indicator Values (EIVs) were used. In order to test the robustness of the RDA results, principal components analysis was applied to the relevés data set as well. Partial RDAs (variance partitioning) were also applied to investigated the proportion of variance attributed to the age of the lava substrate as compared to the rest of environmental factors. The classification revealed seven plant communities (four on PK and three on NK), described in terms of unique species composition, characteristic ecology, and distribution. Three of the communities were dominated by perennials (all found on PK), while the other communities were built prevalently of therophytes (all communities found on NK and one occurring on PK). The age of lava substrate was found among the most important and statistically significant variables. Furthermore, EIVs for light, nitrogen, reaction, and salinity were found to explain relatively high and statistically significant proportions of species data variance. However, the proportion of variance attributed purely to the age of lava substrate was by far smaller than that attributed to the rest explanatory variables. Conclusively, we suggest that the formation of local pioneer vegetation on the studied volcanic islands is not solely controlled by the age of the substrate (“maturation” of the communities through saturation of their local species pools), but it is also under strong control of factors such as the distribution of ashes after the recent volcanic eruptions, and the chemical and physical properties (e. g. nutrient content) of the soils formed by the deposition of the ashes. Abbreviations: Comm. – Community, EIVs – Ellenberg Indicator Values, NK – Nea Kameni, PCA – Principal Components Analysis, PK – Palea Kameni, RDA – Redundancy analysis.

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UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

This output has contributed to the advancement of the following goals:

#14 Life Below Water
#15 Life on Land

Source: InCites

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29 Record Views
17 Times Cited - Web of Science

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Collaboration types
Domestic collaboration
International collaboration
Citation topics
3 Agriculture, Environment & Ecology
3.40 Forestry
3.40.86 Plant Communities
Web Of Science research areas
Ecology
Plant Sciences
ESI research areas
Plant & Animal Science
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