Recently, our team, a close collaborator of Meelis Pärtel’s group in Estonia, published a paper in Nature. This paper presents one of the first results of the DarkDivNet initiative. The study shows that classic measures of diversity, based only on the sampled species, fail to reveal the impoverishment of the potential species pool caused by land use intensification.
The map shows the regions where data were collected. The size of the symbols represents community completeness, while the background map illustrates global variation in the human footprint index. Triangles mark regions where only woody species were sampled, and the symbol shading indicates the proportion of forest cover in each region.
We found a clear trend: as human impact increases, community completeness decreases. In areas with low human footprint, such as Canadian forests or Mongolian grasslands, at least one-third of all suitable plant species are found. In contrast, in regions with high human pressure, such as Central Europe, only about one in five potentially suitable species remains.