In this contribution, new data concerning the distribution of vascular flora alien to Italy are presented. It includes new records, confirmations, exclusions, and status changes for Italy or for Italian administrative regions. Nomenclatural and distribution updates published elsewhere are provided as Suppl. material 1.
Habitat monitoring in Europe is regulated by Article 17 of the Habitats Directive, which suggests the use of typical species to habitat conservation status. Yet, the Directive uses the term “typical” species but does not provide a definition, either for its use in reporting or for its use in impact assessments. To address the issue, an online workshop was organized by the Italian Society for Vegetation Science (SISV) to shed light on the diversity of perspectives regarding the different concepts of typical species, and to discuss the possible implications for habitat monitoring. To this aim, we inquired 73 people with a very different degree of expertise in the field of vegetation science by means of a tailored survey composed of six questions. We analysed the data using Pearson's Chi-squared test to verify that the answers diverged from a random distribution and checked the effect of the degree of experience of the surveyees on the results. We found that most of the surveyees agreed on the use of the phytosociological method for habitat monitoring and of the diagnostic and characteristic species to evaluate the structural and functional conservation status of habitats. With this contribution, we shed light on the meaning of “typical” species in the context of habitat monitoring.
A robust survey method that samples the main characteristics of plant assemblages is needed to assess the conservation status of European habitat in the Natura 2000 network. A measure of variability, called pseudo-multivariate dissimilarity-based standard error (MultSE), was recently proposed for assessing sample-size adequacy in ecological communities. Here, we used it on coastal sand dune systems in three Special Areas of Conservation (SACs) in Tuscany. Our aim was to assess the minimum number of replicates necessary to adequately characterize sand dune environments in terms of differences between habitats and SACs, after a preliminary baseline assessment of plant diversity. Analysis of α and β diversity indicated that especially between habitats the three SACs protect different plant communities. The study of the MultSE profiles showed that the minimum number of replicates needed to assess differences among habitats varied between 10 and 25 plots. Two-way PERMANOVA and SIMPER analysis on the full and reduced datasets confirmed that SACs and habitats host different plant communities, and that the contribution of the target species remained unchanged even with a reduced sample size. The proposed methodological approach can be used to develop cost-effective monitoring programs and it can be useful for plant ecologists and biodiversity managers for assessing ecosystem health and changes.
The assessment of the ecosystem state is fundamental to understand the success of ecological rehabilitation, especially in the long term. We aim to evaluate the rehabilitation success of a unique Mediterranean dune system site along the Tyrrhenian coast of Italy which underwent a dune consolidation intervention and species planting at the beginning of the twentieth century after the destruction of the natural ecosystem. We used three nearby non‐rehabilitated protected coastal sites with different degrees of disturbance as reference sites encompassing different potential rehabilitation outcomes of the target site. To assess the overall result of the intervention, we used several plant characteristics and measured taxonomic and functional beta‐diversity between all sites. We compared the proportions of typical and ruderal species of dune habitat types across sites. We further used the species–area relationship to examine if the number of observed species in our sites differed from the expected. Our analyses revealed that the rehabilitated site was taxonomically and functionally more similar to the least disturbed site. We suggest that plant characteristics arising from botanical inventories can be fruitfully used in rehabilitation assessment as they value the taxonomic and functional species diversity at the community scale. We conclude that plant characteristics compared across sites are useful tools in ecosystem state assessment if they reflect the ecological functions and conservation values of the natural ecosystems.
This study aims to characterize saline habitats of the Tuscan coast based on the Natura 2000 Habitats Directive 92/43/ECC. These habitats include Atlantic salt meadows (1330), Mediterranean salt meadows (1410) Mediterranean and thermo-Atlantic halophilous scrubs (1420), and Mediterranean salt steppes (1510). We compiled vegetation data from a total of 418 plots carried out during our own fieldwork (N = 157) and published scientific literature (N = 261). We performed a Linear Discriminant Analysis to associate species to habitats and used the phi coefficient of association to identify diagnostic species of each habitat. For each habitat, we provide a regional syntaxonomic framework, constant species, cover coefficients, diagnostic species (phi) and “typical species”. We identified groups of species, that we called “local assembly of typical species”, composed by species with a phi coefficient > 20 and/or a cover coefficient > 50 that can be used to identify the habitats and to monitor their conservation status at the local level. This study revealed differences in the “local assembly of typical species” among habitats, characterized by fewer species in habitats 1420 and 1510, and many species in habitats 1410 and 1310. Our results showed that the habitat 1510 was recognizable only for the high cover value of Limonium narbonense and, at least in Tuscany, its syntaxonomic attribution to the order Limonietalia is uncertain. We tested this approach only for a few habitats, but a broader applicability based on other habitats is desirable.
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