Marine litter and psammophytes: a case study in the Migliarino-San Rossore-Massaciuccoli Regional Park coastal sand dunes

Coastal sand dunes are one of the most impacted ecosystems in the world (1). They host various habitats of Community interest under the Habitats Directive 92/43/EEC but are profoundly affected by pollution and waste management, even within protected areas. The factors that define the amount, type and distribution of beach litter are complex and relate more to human intervention and natural variables. This work aims to analyse the composition, abundance and distribution of marine litter within a protected area in two different chronological windows, i.e. before and after the bathing season. We also attempted to verify whether the presence of waste could alter the coverage of the psammophilous vegetation. The protected area examined in this project is the Migliarino-San Rossore-Massaciuccoli Regional Park (Tuscany, Italy), where we selected three dune sites stretching along the coastline with a North/South gradient: Lecciona (2 Km2), Bufalina (1 Km2) and Calambrone (1 Km2), respectively. We adopted a stratified random sampling design, using permanent multiscale squared-plots of 16 m2, with two nested plots placed at a fixed corner of 4 m2 and 1 m2, respectively. Each site was divided into same-area strata with a spatially optimised algorithm. Inside each layer two points were randomly selected, corresponding to the field plots; overall, a total of 22 plots were sampled. Sampling took place in two sessions, one in May and the other one in November. The data collected were the total percentage coverage of litter and the individual coverage of each type of litter for each plot. Classification of marine litter followed the directives of the "Master List of Categories of Litter Items", a list drawn up by the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission based on several classification protocols (2). At the same time, we censused the plant species in each plot and measured their total percentage coverage at each investigated spatial scale. We compiled a litter × plot matrix with the percentage of coverage of each type of waste found in the plots at the three spatial scales and in the two periods. The PERMANOVA analysis of the matrix with 4 factors (month, site, layer and plot area) highlighted that the interaction term month × site explained significantly (P< 0.001) the variance in the composition of waste at the plot level. NMDS analysis (non-metric multidimensional scaling) showed that the categories most significantly related to the variability between plots were the following: "plastic fragments less than 2.5 cm (G78)" and "plastic fragments between 2.5 and 50 cm (G79)". These two types of litter showed contrasting patterns over time: G78 increased from June to November, G79 decreased in the same period. Multivariate analyses were carried out using the software PRIMER v.7 (3) and PERMANOVA+ (4). The diachronic study of the relationship between area and the number of litter categories, carried out using the Arrhenius power law equation (5), showed that in Lecciona and Bufalina there was in November a greater growth in types of litter as the area increased in respect to the first sampling period, while in Calambrone there were no differences. According to Pearson correlation test, temporal turnover of litter categories, quantified partitioning β-diversity following (6), and the total percentage coverage of vegetation resulted inversely correlated (cor = - 0.44, P = 0.038). In conclusion, artificial polymer materials were found to be the dominant waste type (85%) at the three study sites examined, two of which were characterised by an increase in waste after the bathing season. In the third site, however, probably due to regular manual cleaning actions, no differences were found. Where vegetation is more abundant, the total number of litter categories tends to be more stable across the seasons, suggesting that psammophytes are a relevant biotic component to be considered in the analysis of spatio-temporal dynamics of coastal litter. 1) Ciccarelli D., 2014. Environ. Manag. 54, 194–204 2) Galgani F., Hanke G., Werner S., et al. (2013) JRC Scientific and Policy reports 3) Clarke K., Warwick R. (2001). Change in marine communities: an approach to statistical analysis and interpretation Ed. 2. PRIMER-E, Plymouth 4) Anderson M.J., Gorley R.N., Clarke R.K. (2008). PERMANOVA+ for PRIMER: Guide to software and statistical methods. PRIMER-E, Plymouth 5) Arrhenius O. (1921) J Ecol, 9, 95-99 6) Baselga A. (2010). Glob Ecol Biogeogr, 19, 134-14

Was Charles Darwin right in his explanation of the ‘abominable mystery’?

The site and time of origin of angiosperms are still debated. The co-occurrence of many of the early branching lineages of flowering plants in a region somewhere between Australia and the SW Pacific islands suggests a possible Gondwanan origin of angiosperms. The recent recognition of Zealandia, a 94% submerged continent in the east of Australia, could explain the discrepancy between molecular clocks and fossil records about the age of angiosperms, supporting the old Darwinian hypothesis of a “lost continent” to explain the “abominable mystery” regarding the origin and rapid radiation of flowering plants

Contributi alla flora vascolare di Toscana. VII (357-439)

New localities and/or confirmations concerning 83 specific and subspecific plant taxa of Tuscan vascular flora, belonging to 71 genera and 33 families are presented: Carpobrotus (Aizoaceae), Alternanthera (Amaranthaceae), Leucojum (Amaryllidaceae), Anacyclus, Andryala, Carduus, Centaurea, Cichorium, Erigeron, Helichrysum, Helminthotheca, Hieracium, Limbarda, Pilosella, Scolymus, Sonchus, Tagetes, Urospermum, Xanthium (Asteraceae), Mahonia (Berberidaceae), Myosotis (Boraginaceae), Biscutella, Ionopsidium, Raphanus, Rapistrum (Brassicaceae), Buxus (Buxaceae), Vaccaria (Caryophyllaceae), Cistus (Cistaceae), Calystegia, Cuscuta (Convolvulaceae), Cymodocea (Cymodoceaceae), Cyperus (Cyperaceae), Amorpha, Emerus, Lathyrus, Lotus, Ononis, Trifolium, Vicia (Fabaceae), Quercus (Fagaceae), Geranium (Geraniaceae), Myriophyllum (Haloragaceae), Malva (Malvaceae), Epipogium, Himantoglossum (Orchidaceae), Orobanche (Orobanchaceae), Osyris (Santalaceae), Oxalis (Oxalidaceae), Pinus (Pinaceae), Anisantha, Avellinia, Avena, Corynephorus, Crypsis, Cutandia, Elytrigia, Lolium, Panicum, Polypogon, Sporobolus (Poaceae), Rumex (Polygonaceae), Lysimachia (Primulaceae), Eranthis, Ranunculus (Ranunculaceae), Rubus (Rosaceae), Crucianella, Galium (Rubiaceae), Verbascum (Scrophulariaceae), Solanum (Solanaceae), Tamarix (Tamaricaceae), Viola (Violaceae). In the end, the conservation status of the units and eventual protection of the cited biotopes are discussed

Notulae to the Italian native vascular flora: 4

In this contribution new data concerning the distribution of native vascular flora in Italy are presented. It includes new records, exclusion, extinction and confirmations to the Italian administrative regions for taxa in the genera Androsace, Artemisia, Fragaria, Melampyrum, Myosotis, Petrorhagia, Phillyrea, Rosa, Rumex, Spiranthes, Trifolium, and Vicia. Furthermore, a new combination in the genus Omalotheca is proposed

Notulae to the Italian alien vascular flora: 1

In this contribution, new data concerning the Italian distribution of alien vascular flora are presented. It includes new records, exclusions, and confirmations for Italy or for Italian administrative regions for taxa in the genera Agave, Arctotheca, Berberis, Bidens, Cardamine, Catalpa, Cordyline, Cotoneaster, Dichondra, Elaeagnus, Eragrostis, Impatiens, Iris, Koelreuteria, Lamiastrum, Lantana, Ligustrum, Limnophila, Lonicera, Lycianthes, Maclura, Mazus, Paspalum, Pelargonium, Phyllanthus, Pyracantha, Ruellia, Sorghum, Symphyotrichum, Triticum, Tulbaghia and Youngia

Designing and comparing novel methods in floristics: a case study in the Migliarino-San Rossore-Massaciuccoli Regional Park

Floristic inventories are an essential part of basic and applied researches in botany. Despite a long history in floristic investigations, they are still conducted following a purposive approach, without substantial improvements in recent decades. Accordingly, final outputs are affected by several biases which affect the reliability and the interpretation of results, and the possibility to perform statistical analyses. To the best of my knowledge, there are very few contributions exploring quantitative and standardised approaches from a floristic point of view, and my PhD work intends to push forward the knowledge in this direction. More specifically, my aims are: (i) to explore new uses of the Species-Area Relationship applied to the floristic research (Chapter 1), (ii) to elaborate new tools of floristic cartography and methods to objectively manage floristic knowledge available for a given area (Chapter 2), and (iii) to design and test new sampling algorithms aimed to optimise inventory efficiency, i.e. to maximise species detection reducing sampling effort, and at the same time ensuring objectivity and reproducibility of methods (Chapter 3). The focus of Chapter 1 is to unravel patterns of floristic richness in Tuscany, using a new modeling approach based on the Species-Area Relationship (SAR), namely the increase in the species number with the increase of the area. Residuals in a SAR model, i.e. divergences among observed and predicted values, reflect the actual floristic richness after the removal of the area effect. However, residual values are not able to elucidate, per se, the contribution of environmental variables in causing their divergence from predicted values. To overcome this limitation, I applied to the study area a spatially explicit modeling technique, (i) to quantify how each environmental variable affects SAR residuals, and (ii) to improve species richness predictions, by adjusting the SAR model according to local environmental features. Firstly, I collated 67 floras published after 1970 across Tuscany. For each flora, I extracted the area extent and the number of total, alien, and native taxa inventoried. Then, I georeferenced the study area boundaries to sample a plethora of environmental variables. These variables were used as predictors in a Generalised Linear Model having the SAR residual as dependent variable and the spatial autocorrelation removed. Results show that the area alone explains 87% of the variance of total species richness (86% for native and 56% for alien species, respectively); the total species richness expected for 1 km2 is 303.4 taxa, 12.0 of which are estimated to be aliens. The model for all species, adjusted by environmental predictors, allows to explain more than 47% of deviance of SAR’s residuals. The predictors of species richness at Tuscan level are ‘insularity’, ‘topographic heterogeneity’, ‘spatial heterogeneity of temperature annual range’, and ‘annual precipitation’. This approach pushes forward the floristic research on both theoretical and practical grounds. Firstly, it allows an innovative use of floristic data to quantitatively assess patterns of species richness. Secondly, it represents an operative tool to make adjusted a priori species number predictions for a given territory. The Chapter 2 is based on the quantitative management of the ‘floristic ignorance’, defined here as a composite condition of complete lack of data, few data, and/or data with high uncertainties. In a floristic perspective, knowledge is essentially based on occurrence records. The availability of huge amount of records as available in the epoch of ‘big data’ poses new challenges for reliable analyses and correct interpretation of results. Indeed, to safely deal with occurrence records, we must consider their uncertainty, which can introduce biases within analyses. I developed an objective framework coded in R programming language, to explicitly include spatial and temporal uncertainties during the mapping and listing of plant occurrence records for a given study area. My workflow returns a ‘Map of Floristic Ignorance’ (MFI), which represents the spatial distribution of floristic ignorance across a study area, and a ‘Virtual Floristic List’ (VFL), i.e. a list of taxa potentially occurring in that area, showing a probability of occurrence for each taxon. Uncertainty cannot be avoided, but it may be incorporated into biodiversity analyses through appropriate methodological approaches and innovative spatial representations. This contribution introduces a workflow which pushes forward the analytical capacities to deal with uncertainty in biological occurrence records, allowing to produce more reliable outputs. From a practical point of view, both MFI and VFL are useful tools to plan and carry out field sampling activities, allowing (i) to detect areas needing additional sampling effort, and (ii) to draft a list of taxa already recorded for a given study site, providing a probability of occurrence for each taxon. The main focus of the Chapter 3 is to explore the drafting of a floristic inventory by means of probabilistic approaches, based on geostatistical designs. I planned, carried out, and then compared two different sampling strategies: (i) a stratified random sampling design based solely on a coarse environmental stratification followed by a spatial optimization criterion (‘basic strategy’, no prior information is available), and (ii) a sampling design based on the maximisation of the spectral heterogeneity among sampling units, quantified in terms of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index values (‘advanced strategy’). The strategy that maximises collected floristic information was assessed basing on a combination of descriptive and quantitative statistics, such as the completeness of the floristic inventory, the steepness of the rarefaction curves, and the plots contributions to the total β diversity. The advanced strategy detected more taxa than the basic strategy in all the sampling sites investigated. In addition, the rarefaction curve obtained with advanced strategy is steeper in accumulating taxa respect to the basic strategy. The analysis of the contribution of each plot to the total β diversity showed that the advanced strategy selects sampling units having a more homogeneously distributed contribution among plots (i.e. higher complementarity 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 to perform the advanced strategy – to the best of my knowledge proposed here for the first time – can be profitably and freely applied to every geographic area, showing flexibility for several ecological and vegetational contexts. As conclusion of my work, all single parts developed during the three years are integrated and summarised in a flowchart, finalised in a protocol to draft a flora in an objective way

STUDIO DELL'ECOLOGIA DELL'IMPOLLINAZIONE DI CAMPANULA MEDIUM L. (CAMPANULACEAE), UNA SPECIE DI INTERESSE ORNAMENTALE E CONSERVAZIONISTICO

Campanula medium L. (Campanulaceae) è una specie erbacea bienne, endemica dell’Italia nord-occidentale e della Francia sud-orientale. Risulta anche diffusa, come alloctona, in buona parte d’Europa, verosimilmente facilitata dal suo elevato interesse come pianta ornamentale. A livello normativo, la pianta ricade nel regime protettivo istituito dalla Legge Regionale Toscana 56/00 (All. A). In ragione del suo interesse sia economico che conservazionistico, il presente lavoro di tesi si è focalizzato sull’indagine dell’ecologia dell’impollinazione della specie, la cui conoscenza rappresenta un elemento cruciale per pianificare strategie di conservazione e ottimizzare la gestione in coltivazione. Il genere Campanula è inoltre costituito da specie, seppur in diverso grado, proterandre e con presentazione secondaria del polline. Gli studi finora realizzati su C. medium hanno quasi esclusivamente riguardato aspetti orticolturali e fisiologici, trascurando aspetti di ecologia dell’impollinazione e biologia riproduttiva. La popolazione spontanea selezionata per questo studio è localizzata sulle Alpi Apuane, presso l’Orto Botanico “Pietro Pellegrini e Maria Ansaldi” di Pian della Fioba (Massa); le attività sperimentali sono state condotte negli anni 2008, 2015 e 2016. Al fine di determinare il breeding system, sono state previste 7 categorie sperimentali per un totale di 123 fiori: (i) controllo, (ii) supplementazione, (iii) autoimpollinazione spontanea, (iv) autoimpollinazione forzata, (v) geitonogamia, (vi) xenogamia e (vii) apomissia. Ciascun fiore del campione è stato marcato e seguito giornalmente per registrare la fenologia, la produzione di frutti e il seed set. Con i dati ottenuti, sono stati calcolati l’Index of Self Incompatibility (ISI), l’Index of Automatic Self-pollination (IAS), l’entità della pollen limitation della popolazione studiata, nonché la dinamica temporale delle fasi sessuali del fiore. Sui semi prodotti dalla specie sono stati rilevati i dati morfometrici (lunghezza, larghezza) ed è stato inoltre testato il trend germinativo in condizioni controllate (temperatura alternata 25/15° C con 12 h di fotoperiodo). Su un campione di 51 fiori in diversi stadi fenologici, casualmente prelevati nella popolazione, si è provveduto a stimare la vitalità pollinica (mediante saggio colorimetrico MTT) e la ricettività stigmatica (mediante Perex test). In merito allo studio della biologia stigmatica, è stato studiato il grado e la velocità di apertura in funzione della presenza di polline sullo stilo. Infine, è stato osservato lo spettro degli insetti visitatori dei fiori e registrato il comportamento di ciascuno, al fine di una loro attribuzione ad una delle seguenti categorie: impollinatori, ladri di polline, visitatori occasionali. La verifica della distribuzione normale dei dati è stata effettuata con il test di Shapiro-Wilk, mentre per saggiare correlazioni e trend significativi (p ≤ 0.01) sono stati applicati i test di Spearman, del Chi Quadro e di analisi della varianza (e.g. ANOVA). Lo studio ha rivelato che C. medium è autoincompatibile e completamente xenogama. La proterandria risulta confermata per la specie: la fase sessuale maschile e femminile sono chiaramente separate, con la presenza del polline sullo stilo che influenza negativamente la velocità di apertura e la ricettività dello stigma. Per quanto concerne la fenologia fiorale, l’antesi è risultata molto più lunga nei fiori trattati con polline omologo (14.13 ± 4.32 giorni) rispetto a quelli trattati con xenogamia (4.15 ± 1.52). I semi presentano un tasso di germinazione medio del 92% (min: 84%, max: 96%). Gli insetti visitatori più frequenti, inquadrabili come potenziali impollinatori, risultano essere imenotteri apoidei polilettici (Apis mellifera L., Bombus terrestris (L.), Xylocopa violacea (L.) e Anthidium sp.), mentre si è registrata una intensa attività, come ladri di polline, da parte di coleotteri curculionidi appartenenti alla specie Cleopomiarus longirostris (Gyllenhal)

Nomenclatural and taxonomical notes on some taxa described by Roberto de Visiani from Egypt and Sudan

We provide nomenclatural and taxonomical information on the names of sixteen taxa treated by Roberto de Visiani from Egypt and Nubia (Sudan) in his 1836 work \u2018Enumerazione ed illustrazione di alcune piante dell\u2019Egitto e della Nubia con otto tavole in rame\u2019. We designate ten lectotypes (for Chrozophora brocchiana, Convolvulus lasiospermus, Corchorus fruticulosus, Croton obliquifolium, Heliotropium brocchianum, Lithospermum obtusum, Trianthema sedifolia, Trigonella arguta, Trigonella dura, and Volkameria acerbiana), and one neotype (for Convolvulus lasiospermus)

Chromosome numbers for the Italian flora: 5

In this contribution new chromosome data obtained on material collected in Italy are presented. It includes 7 chromosome counts for Centaurea (Asteraceae)