Description
We recorded all species of vascular plants on 112 kurgans (burial mounds, tumuli) located in the Kherson region, southern Ukraine (46.63–47.36° N, 32.29–34.32°E; 39–96 m a.s.l.; ). We studied each kurgan at least twice during the field season to ensure completeness of the species lists. The study area belongs to the West Pontic grass (true) steppe zone, where the natural vegetation is dominated by tussock grasses, but is also relatively rich in forbs adapted to summer drought as well as spring therophytes and geophytes. Ukraine has the highest number of kurgans in Europe, with c. 150,000 (of the formerly c. 500,000 remaining, the majority having been destroyed by ploughing or archaeological excavations). Nowadays, in many regions of Ukraine, kurgans play a role of habitat islands (and one of the last enclaves) for steppe species and steppe vegetation in highly transformed, agricultural landscape. The conversion of the steppe to arable land occurred in the study area between 200 and 100 years ago (Lisetskii, 1992). In the Kherson region, steppe vegetation remained on less than 5% of the territory (Burkovskyi et al., 2013). The data collected in the study were used for modeling of vascular plant species richness in dependence of habitat island size and several environmental factors. The results indicated high impact of the size of a kurgan as well as landscape factors (like amount of the remaining habitat in a kurgan surroundings) on species richness of those habitat islands. To avoid data duplication, this dataset does not include species occurrences from 2004/2006 (https://doi.org/10.15468/x4drnu) published before.
Data Records
The data in this occurrence resource has been published as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A), which is a standardized format for sharing biodiversity data as a set of one or more data tables. The core data table contains 6,560 records.
This IPT archives the data and thus serves as the data repository. The data and resource metadata are available for download in the downloads section. The versions table lists other versions of the resource that have been made publicly available and allows tracking changes made to the resource over time.
Versions
The table below shows only published versions of the resource that are publicly accessible.
How to cite
Researchers should cite this work as follows:
Dembicz I, Sudnik-Wójcikowska B, Moysiyenko I, Vynokurov D, Davydova A (2023): Steppe islands in a sea of fields (southern Ukraine). v1.1. Kherson State University. Dataset/Occurrence. https://ukraine.ipt.gbif.no/resource?r=kurhans_south&v=1.1
Rights
Researchers should respect the following rights statement:
The publisher and rights holder of this work is Kherson State University. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC-BY-NC 4.0) License.
GBIF Registration
This resource has been registered with GBIF, and assigned the following GBIF UUID: c9f3cec0-c806-4ec0-bf90-c4f5d2723213. Kherson State University publishes this resource, and is itself registered in GBIF as a data publisher endorsed by Participant Node Managers Committee.
Keywords
Occurrence; cultural heritage; habitat island; flora; kurgan; Southern Ukraine; steppe
Contacts
- Metadata Provider ●
- Originator ●
- Point Of Contact
- Originator
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6022-9235
- Originator
- Originator
- Originator
Geographic Coverage
Southern Ukraine.
| Bounding Coordinates | South West [44.528, 26.982], North East [49.895, 37.178] |
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Taxonomic Coverage
The dataset includes 383 taxa of vascular plants (determined to 356 species and 27 to genus level).
| Kingdom | Plantae |
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| Phylum | Tracheophyta |
| Class | Gnetopsida, Liliopsida, Magnoliopsida |
Temporal Coverage
| Start Date / End Date | 2012-01-01 / 2016-01-01 |
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Sampling Methods
In the years 2012–2016, we recorded the vascular plant flora of 86 kurgans that were in a relatively good state (i.e., they still contained at least five steppe plant species and were not flattened by illegal excavations or agricultural activities). They were selected to represent a wide range in size and degree of isolation from larger steppe areas. We visited each kurgan at least twice during a season to ensure completeness of the species lists. For the further analyses, we added published data from 26 kurgans located in the same region and studied with similar methods (Sudnik-Wójcikowska and Moysiyenko, 2006), resulting in 112 kurgans in the final dataset.
| Study Extent | We conducted the field sampling in the Kherson region, southern Ukraine (46.63–47.36° N, 32.29–34.32°E; 39–96 m a.s.l.). The climate is continental, with a mean annual temperature of 9–10°C and a mean annual precipitation of 415–450 mm (Fick and Hijmans, 2017). The landscapes are dominated by vast, slightly undulating plains. Loess is the most common geological surface formation, reaching a thickness of several tens of meters (Boiko, 1998). The study area belongs to the West Pontic grass (true) steppe zone (Bohn et al., 2004). The natural vegetation is dominated by tussock grasses, but is also relatively rich in forbs adapted to summer drought as well as spring therophytes and geophytes. |
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| Quality Control | The identification of vascular plant species was held with morphological methods at the field and in the Kherson State University Laboratory of Plant Ecology and Environmental Protection. Coordinates of records were checked using Google Earth service and GIS. Data cleaning using OpenRefine. |
Method step description:
- Field sampling
- Recording and identification of vascular plants
- Completing of cheklist of vascular plant
- Data post-processing according to the Darwin Core standards
- Data checking and cleaning in OpenRefine
Bibliographic Citations
- Dembicz, I, Moysiyenko, II, Kozub, Ł, Dengler, J, Zakharova, M, Sudnik-Wójcikowska, B (2021). Steppe islands in a sea of fields: Where island biogeography meets the reality of a severely transformed landscape. J Veg Sci. ; 32:e12930 https://doi.org/10.1111/jvs.12930
- Dembicz, I, Moysiyenko, II, Shaposhnikova, A, Vynokurov, D, Kozub, Ł, Sudnik-Wójcikowska, B (2016). Isolation and patch size drive specialist plant species density within steppe islands: a case study of kurgans in southern Ukraine, Biodiversity and Conservation 25(12), 2289-2307. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-016-1077-y
- Sudnik-Wójcikowska B, Moysiyenko II (with I. Dembicz, H. Galera, A. Rowińska, M. Zachwatowicz). 2012. Kurhany na „Dzikich Polach” – dziedzictwo kultury i ostoja ukraińskiego stepu. [Kurgans in the ‘Wild Field’ – a cultural heritage and refugium of the Ukrainian steppe] [Kurgani “Dikogo polia” – kulturna spadshchina i prikhistok ukrainskogo stepu]. Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, Warszawa, pp. 194 + CD.
Additional Metadata
| Alternative Identifiers | c9f3cec0-c806-4ec0-bf90-c4f5d2723213 |
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| https://ukraine.ipt.gbif.no/resource?r=kurhans_south |