Ricerc@Sapienza

Changes in agricultural practices represent one of themain causes of shift in species composition of arable plant communities. In particular, the intensification of agriculture going on worldwide since several decades led to heavy transformations of arable plant diversity. Basing on a study conducted in 1964 in Latium (central Italy), we re-surveyed the arable plant communities of 21 maize fields in order to assess the shifts that occurred over 50 years.

We present the first inventory of the segetal flora of Italian winter cereal crops and allied crop types. The database consists of over 30,000 records, derived from different sources. We provide information and analyses on life forms, chorotypes, Ellenberg indicator values and preferential habitats of the flora. The inventory includes 987 vascular taxa and nothotaxa (868 species, 118 subspecies and 1 nothosubspecies), belonging to 354 genera and 55 families. Characteristic segetal species are 128, while 740 are generalist or accidental species from other habitats.