Ricerc@Sapienza

My research focuses on the analysis of plant community composition and plant species diversity in response to environmental, historical and human factors.
During my PhD in Botany, I investigated the effect of fragmentation, historical factors and human disturbances on the plant diversity of the woodlands embedded in the agricultural landscape around the city of Rome.
After receiving my PhD, I became involved in international cooperation projects on nature conservation across different biogeographical regions of the world. I worked for three years in the arid subtropical Socotra Archipelago (Yemen), in the framework of UNDP and the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs projects to develop the Sustainable Development Plan for the islands. For this purpose, I analyzed the composition of the plant communities and the environmental/human factors affecting their distribution and carried out specific research on the most important endemic species. I am now involved in a new project there, for the conservation of Boswellia endemic trees.
I’ve been involved in the National Forest Inventory of Papua New Guinea (funded by FAO) for three years, for developing and testing in the field a methodology to assess plant taxonomic-structural-functional diversity of the tropical rain forests. The project is still ongoing and I’m now collaborating in the production of scientific publications using plant data that we collected, but also multi-taxonomic analysis merging zoological (birds, insects) and pedological data collected by other international teams.
For several years, I worked in the Balkan region, mainly Albania, in the framework of different international projects funded by the European Union, IUCN and the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, all focusing on the design and establishment of Protected Areas and the Natura 2000 network. The intensive phytosociological exploration of Albania allowed the publication of several papers and I will soon develop a synthesis of the vegetation of the country.
Thanks to the precious data collected during the exploration of these understudied regions, I joined important international repositories of plot data (EVA, GIVD, S-Plot) and I am currently involved in several research activities arising from there about the analysis of large databases for investigating biogeographical patterns of taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic diversity at a large scale (continental-global).