Piecing together the biogeographic history of Chenopodium vulvaria L. using botanical literature and collections
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Abstract
This study demonstrates the value of legacy literature and historic collections as a source of data on environmental history. Chenopodium vulvaria L. has declined in Northern Europe and is of conservation concern in several countries, whereas in other countries it has naturalised and is considered an alien weed. It is hypothesised that much of its former distribution was the result of repeated introductions from its native range in southern Europe and that its decline in northern Europe is the result of habitat change and a reduction in number of propagules imported to the north. An historical analysis of its ecology and distribution was conducted by mining legacy literature and historic botanical collections. Text analysis of habitat descriptions written on specimens and published in botanical literature covering a period of more than 200 years indicate that the habitat and introduction pathways of C. vulvaria have changed with time. Using the naturalised alien range in a climate niche model it is possible to project the range in Europe. By comparing this predicted model with a similar model created from all observations it is clear that there is a large discrepancy between the realised and predicted distributions. It is concluded that if C. vulvaria was native to northern Europe, then it was only ever a rare species, however it was more common in the 18th and 19th centuries due to a combination of repeated introductions and the creation of suitable habitats by people.
Cite this as
2014. Piecing together the biogeographic history of Chenopodium vulvaria L. using botanical literature and collections. PeerJ PrePrints 2:e536v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.536v1note This preprint is not peer-reviewed. You may wish to reference the subsequent peer-reviewed version of this article.
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Supplemental Information
A thesaurus of the words contributing to each habitat category
A list of all the words and phrases contributing to each habitat category in the analysis of the Chenopodium vulvaria corpus of habitat descriptions.
Datasets used from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and the Atlas of Living Australia
A list of the datasets and a link to their metadata supplied by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility accessed 08 Nov 2013 and the Atlas of Living Australia accessed 25 February 2013 containing observations of Chenopodium vulvaria.
Citations to the sources of observations and habitat descriptions used in the paper
The references to the sources of observations and habitat descriptions of Chenopodium vulvaria.
Additional Information
Competing Interests
Quentin J Groom is an employee of Botanic Garden Meise, a volunteer with the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland. He is on the Editorial Board of the New Journal of Botany and a Subject Editor for the Biodiversity Data Journal.
Author Contributions
Quentin J Groom conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Data Deposition
The following information was supplied regarding the deposition of related data:
http://www.gbif.org/species/3083932
Funding
This work has been supported by the pro-iBiosphere project funded by the European Commission under the 7th Framework Programme, grant agreement number 312848. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
