Ricerc@Sapienza

Recently, the Albanian Government started the process to join the European Union. This process also involves matching the EU parameters in protecting its biodiversity. In order to support the Albanian authorities, the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, General Directorate for Development Cooperation (DGCS) and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) joined efforts in the project “Institutional Support to the Albanian Ministry of Environment, Forest and Water Administration for Sustainable Biodiversity Conservation and Use in Protected Areas”.

Aims Vegetation-plot records provide information on the presence and cover or abundance of plants co-occurring in the same community. Vegetation-plot data are spread across research groups, environmental agencies and biodiversity research centers and, thus, are rarely accessible at continental or global scales. Here we present the sPlot database, which collates vegetation plots worldwide to allow for the exploration of global patterns in taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic diversity at the plant community level.

A central issue in ecology is understanding how complex and biodiverse food webs persist in the face of disturbance, and which structural properties affect disturbance propagation among species. However, our comprehension of assemblage mechanisms and disturbance propagation in food webs is limited by the multitude of stressors affecting ecosystems, impairing ecosystem management.

Beta-diversity has been repeatedly shown to decline with increasing elevation, but the causes of this pattern remain unclear, partly because they are confounded by coincident variation in alpha- and gamma-diversity. We used 8795 forest vegetation-plot records from the Czech National Phytosociological Database to compare the observed patterns of beta diversity to null-model expectations (beta-deviation) controlling for the effects of alpha- and gamma-diversity.

Aim: Biodiversity monitoring and conservation are extremely complex, and surrogate taxa may represent proxies to test methods and solutions. However, cross-taxon correlations in species diversity (i.e., cross-taxon congruence) may vary widely with spatial scale. Our goal is to assess how cross-taxon congruence varies with spatial scale in European temperate forests. We expect that congruence in species diversity increases when shifting from fine to coarse spatial scales, with differences between species richness and composition, and across pairs of taxonomic groups.

Policies to mitigate climate change and biodiversity loss often assume that protecting carbon-rich forests provides co-benefits in terms of biodiversity, due to the spatial congruence of carbon stocks and biodiversity at biogeographic scales. However, it remains unclear whether this holds at the scales relevant for management, and particularly large knowledge gaps exist for temperate forests and for taxa other than trees.

Plant traits—the morphological, anatomical, physiological, biochemical and phenological characteristics of plants—determine how plants respond to environmental factors, affect other trophic levels, and influence ecosystem properties and their benefits and detriments to people. Plant trait data thus represent the basis for a vast area of research spanning from evolutionary biology, community and functional ecology, to biodiversity conservation, ecosystem and landscape management, restoration, biogeography and earth system modelling.

The interest in the ecological role of weed communities within arable fields has increased greatly in recent years. The aim of this work was to provide an original tool for arable land naturalness estimation, based on the many features of plants that colonize crops. Taking account of taxonomic, structural, chorological and ecological features of weed taxa as exoticism, Raunkier life-form and edaphic preference, a new index (Arable Land Naturalness Index – ALNI) was developed, which allowed for an evaluation score to be obtained for a given field.

The weed vegetation of the bean “Fagiolo Cannellino di Atina” (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) and the red pepper “Peperone di Pontecorvo”
(Capsicum annuum L.) PDO (Protected Designation of Origin) crops was surveyed by means of 16 relevés, sampled in four farms of
southern Latium during July 2019. The relevés were subjected to multivariate analysis, which revealed that the two crops are weeded
by vegetation types referable to two different subassociations of Panico-Polygonetum persicariae (Spergulo-Erodion, Eragrostietalia,

A fungal collection has been recently established at the School of Pharmaceutical Science and Technology (SPST), Tianjin University, Tianjin, China. The collection is mainly based on strains of filamentous fungi preserved under water or mineral oil and by cryoconservation, but also includes some yeasts and bacteria of particular interest for human health. The strains are also kept as actively growing cultures on special low nutrient agar.