DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17867066
title: Brassicaceae diversity in Anatolia / Dataset

description: This repository contains the datasets used in the study “Illuminating a plant-diversity dark spot in the Alpine–Himalayan mountain belt: environmental drivers of Brassicaceae species richness and endemism across Anatolia”. All files correspond to the analyses reported in the article summarized below (running title: Brassicaceae diversity in Anatolia). The repository includes the updated Brassicaceae checklist for Türkiye, cleaned georeferenced occurrence data, cell-based species and endemic richness values, and the corresponding cell-based environmental predictor values.

Illuminating a plant-diversity dark spot in the Alpine–Himalayan mountain belt: environmental drivers of Brassicaceae species richness and endemism across Anatolia

Running title: Brassicaceae diversity in Anatolia

ABSTRACT

Aim

We provide the first nationwide, spatially explicit analytical framework for assessing how environmental and spatial processes structure Brassicaceae species and endemic richness across Anatolia, an understudied segment of the Alpine–Himalayan mountain belt and a global plant-diversity “dark spot”.

Location

Türkiye (Anatolia). 

Methods

We compiled an updated national checklist and >15,000 unique, georeferenced herbarium records for Brassicaceae and aggregated them to 0.5° × 0.5° grid cells. We quantified species and endemic richness per cell and related them to contemporary climate, aridity, long-term climatic stability, net primary productivity, human modification, and topography. We compared ordinary least squares with spatial regression models, performed variation partitioning to separate environmental and spatial components, and applied geographically weighted regression to assess spatial variation in relationships.

Results

Species richness and endemism peak in southern Anatolia and along the Anatolian Diagonal, with additional species-rich areas in the northern parts of the Central Anatolian Plateau. For species richness, topographic roughness has a strong positive effect, whereas annual precipitation has a strong negative effect, consistent with concentration in topographically heterogeneous, relatively dry landscapes. For endemic richness, elevation and roughness have strong positive effects, whereas temperature, past-climatic stability, and aridity index have strong negative effects, indicating that endemics are concentrated in high-elevation, topographically heterogeneous, cooler, climatically stable, and relatively dry landscapes. Environmental gradients explain substantially more variation than purely spatial ones, and geographically weighted regression shows that model fit is highest in the Central Taurus Mountains.

Main conclusions

Topographically complex, climatically stable mountain systems in southern Anatolia and along the Anatolian Diagonal simultaneously act as centres of Brassicaceae richness and endemism. These regions emerge as key conservation priorities for safeguarding both current diversity and evolutionary potential in one of the world’s plant-diversity “dark spots”.

Keywords: Alpine–Himalayan mountain belt, Anatolia, Brassicaceae, conservation biogeography, endemism, species richness