VEGITALY VEGETATION DATABASE: A VALUABLE SOURCE FOR ITALIAN VEGETATION SCIENTISTS

In 2010, the national vegetation database VegItaly, a collaborative project developed by a large group of scientists and supported by the Italian scientific community, was presented at the 46th Conference of the Italian Society for Vegetation Science (SISV) held in Pavia (Italy) [1,2]. Soon the database has been acknowledged in Europe and become a founding partner of the rising European Vegetation Archive (EVA) [3], the first Italian member of the Global Index of Vegetation-Plot Database (www.givd.info/ID/EU-IT-001) and one of the main Southern European reference points for the creation of the European taxonomic standard list for vegetation studies named EuroSL [4]. The number of vegetation plots stored in this repository increased exponentially in the first years. After 2 years, the database already amassed 31,100 vegetation plots [5,6]. The large majority of these plots derived from published sources, representing at the time the largest Italian vegetation database. VegItaly was the first Italian database proposed as a standard to collect and manage vegetation data at the national scale. It currently hosts 37,452 vegetation plots but is not any more the largest Italian vegetation database, outnumbered by the "Vegetation Plot Database - Sapienza University of Rome" and followed by the more recent "AMS-VegBank - Alma Mater Studiorum - University of Bologna". However, VegItaly is still standing as the only vegetation data repository in Italy held and managed by a scientific society. More than 10 years later, the Italian Society for Vegetation Science (SISV) along with the recently-nominated Steering Committee wants to relaunch its use by means of some technical novelties that have been introduced in the meantime. In this contribute, we provide an overview of the current material archived in the database, some basic statistics, data distribution in space and time, and representation of vegetation types

Masters of survival: Why are climate relict plants so important?

The Mediterranean Basin hosts several plant species that are defined as climate relicts. Most of them have a very narrow distribution range, and their survival is very often related to particularly favourable (micro)climatic conditions (e.g., no or slight seasonal water stress, no frost damage). Many of these relict plants represent the last remnants of ecosystems once widespread across the entire Palearctic; they gradually disappeared during the Pleistocene, mostly due to repeated glacial events. Understanding the strategies adopted by climate relicts to face global changes is of paramount interest and may help us to bear light on ongoing climate change. In fact, to survive in the long-term, such plant species underwent important niche shifts, which in turn often required deep changes in their physiologi- cal, anatomical, and reproductive traits. Moreover, most climate relicts live “out of context”, behaving like “special guests” that bear many traits that are uncommon in the plant communities where they currently grow. In fact, they often represent the only survivors of the extinct ecosystems they used to live in, and past global changes may have affected not only the assemblage of co-occurring vascular plants, but also other key components such as pollinators, seed dispersers, predators, symbiotic soil organisms or pathogenic fungi. The study of the distribution pattern of relict plants looks very promising and of paramount concern when combined with the study of other biogeographically peculiar taxa. For instance, it cannot be a coincidence if large ferns of paleotropical origin, narrow-ranged and evolutionary isolated plants, species belonging to monotypic and/or endemic genera or subgenera, and plants with highly fragmented distribution rang- es grow in the same region. Instead, the co-occurrence of such plants may provide valuable pieces of knowledge to the understanding of specific mechanisms and processes allowing their persistence until present time and may represent a useful, complementary clue for identifying important and still neglected refugial areas