The maintenance of certain levels of old forest represents a cornerstone of the EU's biodiversity management strategy. A consensus on a single general ecological definition of old-growth is particularly difficult in Mediterranean Europe. The present paper deals with old-growth forests and persistent woodlands in the Cilento and Vallo di Diano National Park (PNCVD) to give an ecological understanding of forest complexity and dynamics under a multiscale and multidisciplinary perspective. The multiscale approach ranged from the identification and mapping of potential old-growth stands at landscape scale to a two-level field review of forest stand features. Field sampling involved a multidisciplinary team of researchers in forest structure, pedologic environment, soil microbial activity, flora and vegetation and deadwood components. The research provided sound knowledge about old-growthness features in the PNCVD that constitutes a unique case study in the whole Mediterranean basin. The integration of results allowed to: identify main ecosystem functions and the related services of the old-growth forests in the study area; distinguish persistent woodlands, multi-aged stands with old trees deriving from nineteenth-century management practices, from old-growth forests sensu strictu ; recognize indicators of direct and indirect impacts of human activities; suggest effective practices for sustainable management in the Mediterranean context.
According to projects and practices that the Italian botanists and ecologists are carrying out for bringing "more nature in the city", new insights for a factual integration between ecological perspectives and more consolidated aesthetic and agronomic approaches to the sustainable planning and management of urban green areas are provided.Keywords Ecosystem services, Human well-being, Green infrastructure, Urban green areas, Urban biodiversity.
We present a phytogeographic regionalization based on native woody flora, identifying the most useful taxonomic level, geographic variables, and orographic pattern, selecting Italy as a case study. We generated seven distance matrices among the 20 administrative regions, and using Pearson’s correlation coefficients and PCA, we verified whether distances between regions were invariant across the different sampling strategies. Once this invariance was established, we focused on genera representation. We defined two orographic indices and performed Kruskal–Wish multidimensional scaling and K-means clustering to assess Italy’s phytogeographic regionalization. A major north–south and a minor east–west gradient described the relationships between regions. Floristic diversity was strongly correlated with the region’s orography, with hills being the most important orographic feature that increased plant diversity; the effect of the orographic patterns was independent from the geographic clines observed. Despite the coarse scale, our phytogeographic regionalization comprising six clusters (variables = 133 woody genera) was consistent with previous ones based on the endemic flora (variables = 1371 units) or on bioclimatic approaches. In particular, the phytogeographic uniqueness of Northern and peninsular Italy, and of Sardinia Island, was confirmed. The next step will be to test our method at a finer scale.
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