BioScore 3 - Plants: Background and pre-processing of distribution data

Together with PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, Wageningen Environmental Research(WEnR) is developing BioScore, a biodiversity model to assess the impact of pressures like climate change,nitrogen deposition and land use change. This report highlights the selection and pre-processing proceduresof data concerning the distribution of plant species and habitat types as used in BioScore 3.0 to derive doseresponsefunctions. More than 4,500 European plant species were selected to derive a species setrepresentative for almost all terrestrial (semi)-natural EUNIS habitat types, complemented with ten mostcommon anthropogenic vegetation types (ruderal and arable). Data on distribution of these species wereselected from the European Vegetation Archive (EVA). In total 536,900 vegetation plots, covering the 4,500plant species were extracted from the database to serve as input for BioScore 3. To assess the reliability ofenvironmental responses of plant species, as retrieved from BioScore 3, a comparison has been made withpublished ecological indicator values (Ellenberg indicator values)