Research carried out by a team of Italian scientists coordinated by Leonardo Peruzzi, professor of the Department of Biology at the University of Pisa, also director of the university’s botanical garden and museum, showed that Friuli Venezia Giulia is among the three most rich in flora in Italy. The study published in “Plants” is called “Floristic Richness in a Mediterranean Hotspot: A Journey across Italy”: as stated on the website https://greenreport.it/, the richness in question also includes record occurrences of alien species.
Comment:
“It is known in the ecological field that as the available area increases, so does the number of species, so when we talk about floristic wealth, it is not enough to refer to number of species current, but the size of the territory must also be taken into account. The phenomenon that can be modeled by mathematical functions is known as Species-Area Relationship (SAR), and our research was based on studying this relationship in the Italian flora,” he explained. Peruzzi.
I am studying:
The results show that the regions richest in flora are Liguria, Friuli Venezia Giulia, Trentino-Alto Adige, Abruzzo and Valle d’Aosta, while Sardinia, Puglia, Sicily, Emilia-Romagna and Calabria are the poorest. If we consider only the original species, the ranking is slightly different: Trentino-Alto Adige leaves the top places and Abruzzo is third on the podium, while everything at the back remains unchanged. Finally, in terms of foreign species, the richest regions are Liguria, Lombardy, Friuli Venezia Giulia, Trentino-Alto Adige and Veneto, while Basilicata, Valle d’Aosta, Molise, Calabria and Puglia are the poorest. “Abruzzo, Valle d’Aosta and Molise are regions of particular naturalistic interest, as shown by a original floristic wealth higher than expected, and alien lower Lombardy, Veneto, Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna instead show potentially serious conservation problems due to biological invasions, as these relationships are reversed in these areas. Tuscany in particular shows a level of floristic richness only slightly lower than expected. Simply put, this means that the region has more or less native species than would be expected based on the size of its territory, but unfortunately also many more alien species than expected.”
Data:
“We built a dataset of 266 plants of different distribution, from small islands like Stramanari in Sardinia, to approximately 302 thousand km2 of the entire national territory, and then we applied the relationship between species and areas for the entire Italian vascular flora, for native species. only and only for foreign species – he adds Marco D’Antraccoli, curator of the Botanical Garden of the University of Pisa – in this way we were able to evaluate for each flora whether the number of recorded species was above or below the expected values for the area of the affected area. The usefulness of this study goes beyond being able to objectively compare the floristic richness of different Italian regions and obtain a kind of “rating”, in fact, for the first time, we have obtained constants specifically calibrated for the Italian territory, which will now further allow scientists to easily calculate the number of vascular plant species expected for a given area, Lorenzo Peruzzi concludes.