Aquatic Plant Diversity in Italy: Distribution, Drivers and Strategic Conservation Actions

Frontiers in Plant Science
Rossano BolpagniAlessandro Chiarucci

Abstract

Italy is recognized as one of the prominent hot spot areas for plant diversity at regional and global scale, hosting a rich range of ecosystems and habitat types. This is especially true considering aquatic habitats, which represent a major portion of the total water surfaces in the Mediterranean region. Nevertheless, only a scant attention was paid to clarify the species richness of aquatic plant and its contribution to the total diversity at the country scale, despite such plants are seriously threatened at multiple scales. This paper provided the first comprehensive inventory of aquatic plants at the whole country scale, collecting data on species' distribution, trends, and explanatory determinants of species richness. We confirmed the key contribution of Italy to the regional and global aquatic plant diversity with a total of 279 species recorded since 2005, equal to the 88.5%, 55.9% and ∼10% of the richness estimated at European/Mediterranean, Palearctic and global scale, respectively. Ten species are considered extinct in the wild [among whichAldrovanda vesiculosaL.,Caldesia parnassifolia(Bassi ex L.) Parl.,Helosciadium repens(Jacq.) W.J.D. Koch, andPilularia globuliferaL.], four were doubt [among whichLuronium natans(L.)...Continue Reading

References

Mar 14, 2003·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·Marten SchefferRob J M Franken
Jul 28, 2015·Global Change Biology·Belinda GallardoMontserrat Vilà
Jun 18, 2016·Environmental Monitoring and Assessment·Silverio AbatiSimona Ceschin

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Software Mentioned

NMDS
SINAnet
vegan
R
MPI
R package ‘ vegan
WorldClim
ESM
bestglm
CNRM

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