Red Listing plants under full national responsibility: Extinction risk and threats in the vascular flora endemic to Italy

Taxa endemic to a country are key elements for setting national conservation priorities and for driving conservation strategies, since their persistence is entirely dependent on national policy. We applied the IUCN Red List categories to all Italian endemic vascular plants (1340 taxa) to assess their current risk of extinction and to highlight their major threats. Our results revealed that six taxa are already extinct and that 22.4% (300 taxa) are threatened with extinction, while 18.4% (247; especially belonging to apomictic groups) have been categorized as Data Deficient. Italian endemic vascular plants are primarily threatened by natural habitat modification due to agriculture, residential and tourism development. Taxa occurring in coastal areas and lowlands, where anthropogenic impacts and habitat destruction are concentrated, display the greatest population decline and extinction. The national network of protected areas could be considered effective in protecting endemic-rich areas (ERAs) and endemic taxa, but ineffective in protecting narrow endemic-rich areas (NERAs), accordingly changes to the existing network may increase the effectiveness of protection. For the first time in the Mediterranean Basin biodiversity hotspot, we present a comprehensive extinction assessment for endemic plants under the full responsibility of a single country. This would provide an important step towards the prioritization and conservation of threatened endemic flora at Italian, European, and Mediterranean level. A successful conservation strategy of the Italian endemic vascular flora should implement the protected area system, solve some taxonomical criticism in poorly known genera, and should rely on monitoring threatened species, and on developing species-specific action plans

Assumption without representation: the unacknowledged abstraction from communities and social goods

We have not clearly acknowledged the abstraction from unpriceable “social goods” (derived from communities) which, different from private and public goods, simply disappear if it is attempted to market them. Separability from markets and economics has not been argued, much less established. Acknowledging communities would reinforce rather than undermine them, and thus facilitate the production of social goods. But it would also help economics by facilitating our understanding of – and response to – financial crises as well as environmental destruction and many social problems, and by reducing the alienation from economics often felt by students and the public

The Red List of Italian endemic vascular plants

The Italian vascular flora is one of the richest in the European Union and the Italian peninsula is located at the centre of the Mediterranean Basin, one of the 25 world biodiversity hotspots with an exceptional loss of habitats and species (1). Preliminary to any conservation initiative concerning plant diversity, a prioritization of the most endangered species is needed. IUCN Red List protocol is widely recognized and used to evaluate the conservation status of a species, according to its estimated extinction risk (2). Assessing the conservation status of plants endemic to an entire nation is a key challenge, because of the huge amount of data, knowledge and information required. Such a result can be achieved only through the collaboration of many specialists and an adequate financial base. \u201cThe Red List of the Italian Flora\u201d project, promoted by the Ministry for Environment and Protection of Land and Sea General, Directorate for Protection of Nature and Sea, in collaboration with the Italian Botanical Society, started in 2013 with the aim to update the conservation status of Italian plants. In 2016 the assessment of all the vascular plants strictly endemics to Italy was completed. Considering all the Italian endemics, with the exclusion of taxonomically critical genera (i.e. Alchemilla, Hieracium, Ophrys, Pilosella, Ranunculus, Rubus and Taraxacum), a total of 1088 taxa was assessed. Three taxa are considered extinct (EX), one extinct in the wild (EW) and six are possibly extinct (CR[PE]). Around 27% of the Italian endemics are included in one of the major threat categories (CR, EN and VU), while c. 20% may become threatened with extinction in the near future (NT). Around half of the Italian endemic taxa (506) are widespread and abundant taxa (LC). Finally, 80 species (7%) were categorized as Data Deficient since the available data did not allow a robust assessment, indicating that further taxonomic and field studies should be undertaken in the next future