The Kashmir Himalaya, being nestled within north-western folds of the Himalaya, harbours a rich floristic diversity of immense scientific interest and enormous economic potential. Though scientific studies on the floristic diversity in the Kashmir Himalaya have been started about two centuries ago, yet they fall short of the requirements needed urgently in the post-Rio Summit. In fact, at the s...

Anisotropic (direction-dependent) long-distance dispersal (LDD) by wind has been invoked to explain the strong floristic affinities shared among landmasses in the Southern Hemisphere. Its contribution has not yet been systematically tested because of the previous lack of global data on winds. We used global winds coverage from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration SeaWinds scatterom...

In this study, we evaluated the floristic composition of vascular epiphytes in seasonal semideciduous forest fragments of the Itapemirim River basin, Southern State of Espírito Santo, in order to verify its similarity to other semideciduous forests studied in Brazil. Excursions were conducted every fortnight between June 2008 and May 2009, and epiphytes were collected and recorded (55 species, ...

Assessing and mapping patterns of (semi-)natural vegetation types at a large spatial scale is a difficult task. The challenge increases if the floristic variation within vegetation types (i.e., subtype variation of species composition) is the target. A desirable way to deal with this task may be to address such vegetation patterns with remote-sensing approaches. In particular data from multispe...

1 Field studies to evaluate the roles of environmental variation and random dispersal in explaining variation in the floristic composition of rain forest plants at landscape to regional scales have yet to reach a consensus. Moreover, only one study has focused on scales below 10 km 2 , where the effects of dispersal limitation are expected to be easiest to observe. 2 In the present study, we es...

We submitted tree species occurrence and geoclimatic data from 59 sites in a river basin in the Atlantic Forest of southeastern Brazil to ordination, ANOVA, and cluster analyses with the goals of investigating the causes of phytogeographic patterns and determining whether the six recognized subregions represent distinct floristic units. We found that both climate and space were significantly (p...