diversity Article Conservation Genetics of Four Critically Endangered Greek Endemic Plants: A Preliminary Assessment Konstantinos Kougioumoutzis 1,2,3,*,† , Panayiota Kotsakiozi 1,†, Efthalia Stathi 3, Panayiotis Trigas 3 and Aristeidis Parmakelis 1 1 Section of Ecology and Systematics, Department of Biology, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Panepistimiopolis, 15772 Athens, Greece;
[email protected] (P.K.);
[email protected] (A.P.) 2 Division of Plant Biology, Laboratory of Botany, Department of Biology, University of Patras, 26504 Patras, Greece 3 Laboratory of Systematic Botany, Department of Crop Science, Agricultural University of Athens, Iera Odos 75, 11855 Athens, Greece;
[email protected] (E.S.);
[email protected] (P.T.) * Correspondence:
[email protected] † These authors contributed equally to this work. Abstract: The Mediterranean basin constitutes one of the largest global biodiversity hotspots, hosting more than 11,000 endemic plants, and it is recognised as an area with a high proportion of threatened taxa. Nevertheless, only a tiny fraction of the threatened Mediterranean endemics have their genetic diversity assessed, and we are unaware if and how climate change might impact their conservation status. This is even more pronounced in Eastern Mediterranean countries with a rich endemic flora, such as Greece, which hosts a large portion of the plant taxa assessed at the European level under the IUCN criteria. Using inter simple sequence repeats (ISSR) markers and species distribution models, we analysed the genetic diversity and investigated the impacts of climate change on four Citation: Kougioumoutzis, K.; critically endangered and extremely narrow and rare Greek island endemic plants, namely Aethionema Kotsakiozi, P.; Stathi, E.; Trigas, P.; retsina, Allium iatrouinum, Convolvulus argyrothamnos, and Saponaria jagelii.