More species, less effort: designing and comparing sampling strategies to draft optimised floristic inventories

Floristic inventories are an essential part of basic and applied research in botany. Despite a long history in floristic investigations, they are still conducted following non-objective (preferential) sampling approaches. Accordingly, final outputs (i) are extremely variable in the quality and quantity of collected data, (ii) are fully dependent on the researcher ability, and (iii) miss any possibility to perform statistical analyses. The aim of this work is to explore the drafting of a floristic inventory by means of probabilistic approaches, based on geostatistical designs aimed to locate samplings units (plots) in the study area. We planned, carried out and then compared two different sampling strategies: (i) \u2018basic strategy\u2019, a stratified random sampling design based solely on a spatial optimization criterion (no prior information is available), and (ii) \u2018advanced strategy\u2019, a sampling design based on the maximisation of the spectral heterogeneity among sampling units, quantified in terms of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index values (NDVI). The strategy that maximises collected floristic information was assessed based on a combination of descriptive and quantitative statistics, such as the completeness of the floristic inventory, the steepness of the rarefaction curves, the sampling time effort, and the plot contribution to the total \u3b2 diversity. The 'advanced strategy' detected more species than the 'basic strategy' in all the sampling sites. Again, the rarefaction curve obtained with 'advanced strategy' is steeper in accumulating species in respect to the 'basic strategy'. The analysis of the contribution of each plot to the total \u3b2 diversity showed that the 'advanced strategy' selects sampling units having a more homogeneously distributed contribution among plots, and that they are better spatially arranged across the study area to capture environmental peculiarities of sampling sites. Accordingly, the 'advanced strategy' is more effective than the 'basic' one in drafting a species inventory, in the face of just a little more effort in the design of the sampling strategy. The algorithm proposed to perform the 'advanced strategy', proposed here for the first time, can be profitably and freely applied to every geographic location and vegetation context

An inventory of the names of native, non-endemic vascular plants described from Italy, their loci classici and types

The census of the loci classici of 1,227 native, non-endemic vascular plants described from Italy is here presented and described. The effective place of publication of accepted names, basionyms and homotypic synonyms were identified and critically verified. The geographic information on the loci classici was excerpted from the protologues, as well as information on typification for the taxa described before 1 January 1958. The names without a holotype are 1,165. For 591 names a lecto- or neo-typification is available in literature, while 572 currently accepted taxa still need a type designation. For ten of these names showing previous ineffective typification, nomenclatural types are designated here (Allium savii, A. tenuiflorum, Anemone millefoliata, Catapodium tuberculosum, Cynosurus siculus, Filago congesta, Saponaria bellidifolia, Sclerochloa patens, S. zwierleinii, and Vicia leucantha). A new combination (Trisetaria aurea comb. nov.) is proposed. The general picture of the currently accepted taxa of vascular plants described from Italy, including endemics, amounts to 2,631, i.e. about 32% of the native flora currently recorded for the country

IDPlanT: the Italian database of plant translocation

IDPlanT is the Italian Database of Plant Translocation, an initiative of the Nature Conservation Working Group of the Italian Botanical Society. IDPlanT currently includes 185 plant translocations.The establishment of a national database on plant translocation is a key step forward in data sharing and techniques improvement in this field of plant conservatio