Ecological specialization and rarity indices estimated for a large number of plant species in France

Abstract

The biological diversity of the Earth is being rapidly depleted due to the direct and indirect consequences of human activities. Specialist or rare species are generally thought to be more extinction prone than generalist or common species. Testing this assumption however requires that the rarity and ecological specialization of the species are quantified. Many indices have been developed to classify species as generalists vs. specialists or as rare vs. common, but large data sets are needed to calculate these indices.

Here, we present a list of specialization and rarity values for more than 2800 plant species of continental France, which were computed from the large botanical and ecological dataset SOPHY. Three specialization indices were calculated using species co-occurrence data. All three indices are based on (dis)similarity among plant communities containing a focal species, quantified either as beta diversity in an additive (Fridley et al., 2007 [6]) or multiplicative (Zeleny, 2008 [15]) partitioning of diversity or as the multiple site similarity of Baselga et al. (2007) [1]. Species rarity was calculated as the inverse of a species occurrence.