Ricerc@Sapienza

The importance of semi-natural habitats for European nature conservation is widely recognized due to their high species richness and vulnerability to land-use change.
The assessment of habitat conservation status has a key role in the definition of conservation measures, especially for those habitats that are subjected to rapid changes such as semi-natural grasslands. However, many member states still lack standard methodologies for this assessment that is mostly based on an expert-based evaluation lacking well-defined criteria.
We focused on grasslands belonging to the habitat 6210(*), i.e. Semi-natural dry grasslands and scrubland facies on calcareous substrates (Festuco-Brometalia). In 2013-2014, we revisited 132 semi-natural grasslands along the Apennine chain that were originally sampled between 1966 and 1992 and that, at the time of their historical sampling, could be referred to the habitat. We measured the compositional dissimilarity between each newly sampled plot and the corresponding historical species pool and considered these dissimilarities as a measure of the occurred changes.
We aim at using this quantification of the occurred change to define a methodology for the assessment of the conservation status of the priority habitat 6210(*). We will integrate the information on Apennine grasslands with innovative and effective indicators based on plant species composition. These indicators will then be used to derive an index of conservation status for each of the 132 sampling units deriving from the 2013-2014 fieldwork.
Finally, the degree of change to which the habitat was subjected in the last decades will be used to test the index hypothesizing that a lower degree of compositional change from the original community is associated to higher values of the newly defined index of conservation status and viceversa.