0000000000482682
AUTHOR
Sara Landi
Impact of forest management on threatened epiphytic macrolichens: Evidence from a Mediterranean mixed oak forest (Italy)
Abstract: Forest management practices may heavily affect epiphytic cryptogams. This study was conceived in March 2016, as soon as we were informed about an authorized logging for timber within a Mediterranean mixed oak forest in Tuscany (central Italy), which threatened a large population of the forest macrolichen Lobaria pulmonaria (L.) Hoffm., composed of hundreds of fertile thalli. Lobaria pulmonaria is often used as an ecological indicator of high quality habitats hosting rare lichens, and in general, cryptogams worthy of conservation. The species has suffered a general decline throughout Europe as a consequence of air pollution and intensive forest management, and currently it is red-l…
VegItaly: The Italian collaborative project for a national vegetation database
Abstract Two years after its official start, the national vegetation database VegItaly, a collaborative project supported by the Italian scientific community and developed by a large group of scientists, is presented. This article offers a concise overview of the content of the database, currently consisting of 31,100 vegetation plot, including published and unpublished data. Some basic statistics are analysed; for example, data distribution in space and time, represented vegetation types expressed as physiognomic categories. Although rather young and still in progress, VegItaly already contains data from all the Italian regions and stands as an optimal candidate for the development of an I…
Global endemics-area relationships of vascular plants
Endemics–Area Relationships (EARs)are fundamental in theoretical and applied biogeography for understanding distribution patterns and promoting biodiversity conservation. However, calculating EARs for vascular plant species from existing data is problematic because of biased knowledge of endemic species distributions and differences between taxonomies. We aimed to overcome these challenges by developing a new standardized global dataset based on expert knowledge to produce a set of global EARs. We developed a nested circle design, with grain sizes of 10 4 , 10 5 , 10 6 , 10 7 , and 10 8 km 2 , respectively, and a global distribution of plots based on a stratified random scheme. The number …
Does air pollution influence the success of species translocation? Trace elements, ultrastructure and photosynthetic performances in transplants of a threatened forest macrolichen
Abstract Species translocation can be considered as a primary conservation strategy with reference to in situ conservation. In the case of lichens, translocations often risk to fail due stress factors associated with unsuitable receptor sites. Considering the bioecological characteristics of lichens, air pollution is among the most limiting stress factors. In this study, the forest macrolichen Lobaria pulmonaria was used as a model to test the hypothesis that the translocation of sensitive lichens is effective only in unpolluted environments. At purpose, 500 fragments or whole thalli were translocated in selected beech forests of Central Europe (the Western Carpathians, Slovakia) where the …