Conservation assessment of the endemic plants of the Tuscan Archipelago, Italy B RUNO F OGGI,DANIELE V ICIANI,RICCARDO M. BALDINI A NGELINO C ARTA and T OMMASO G UIDI Abstract The Mediterranean islands support a rich di- Circa 25,000 species are native to the region, with a high versity of flora, with a high percentage of endemic species. percentage of endemism (50–59%: Greuter, 1991; Médail We used the IUCN categories and criteria to assess the & Quèzel, 1997), and the archipelagos of the Mediterranean conservation status of 16 endemic plant taxa (species and are thus a natural laboratory for evolutionary studies subspecies) of the Tuscan Archipelago, based on data (Thompson, 1999). collected during field surveys over 4 years. Our data were A taxon is considered endemic when its distribution sufficient to use criteria B, C and D in our assessment. We is circumscribed to a well-defined geographical district used criterion B in the assessment of all 16 taxa, criterion C (Anderson, 1994; Cuttelod et al., 2008). Endemic taxa may for four taxa, criterion D for 11 taxa and criteria B, C and be defined as rare and potentially threatened (Ellstrand & D for three taxa, Centaurea gymnocarpa, Limonium doriae Elam, 1993; Fjeldså, 1994; Linder, 1995; Ceballos et al., 1998; and Silene capraria. According to our results L. doriae, Myers et al., 2000;Işik, 2011), and therefore they may be Romulea insularis and S. capraria are categorized as considered conservation priorities (Schnittler & Ludwig, Critically Endangered and therefore require immediate 1996; Gruttke et al., 1999). Populations of many species conservation measures; eight taxa are categorized as have declined (Butchart et al., 2010; SCBD, 2010) and Endangered, two as Vulnerable and three as Near extinction rates exceed background extinction rates by two Threatened. Compared to earlier assessments, eight species to three orders of magnitude (Pimm et al., 1995). are recategorized with a higher degree of threat, two species The most authoritative source of information on the are recategorized with a lower degree of threat, five are global conservation status of species is the IUCN Red List unchanged, and one species is assessed for the first time. (Miller et al., 2007), which uses objective standards based on Based on the IUCN categorization our results show that all the assessment of extinction risk at the global level to the endemic species of the Tuscan Archipelago are directly provide researchers with a system for comparing data and/or indirectly threatened by human activities, such as (IUCN, 2001, 2011; Mace et al., 2008). tourism and agriculture, and invasive species of plants and The IUCN Centre for Mediterranean Cooperation and animals. The Tuscan Archipelago National Park is respon- the IUCN Species Survival Commission have highlighted sible for the conservation of all endemic species in the area. plant conservation and assessment as regional priorities for action (Delanoë et al., 1996). A project to assess the Keywords Conservation, endemic, flora, islands, IUCN conservation status of 454 aquatic plant species and Red List, Mediterranean, threatened species 19 subspecies in the Mediterranean was carried out during 2007–2010 2013 This paper contains supplementary material that can be (IUCN, ) and an evaluation of Medi- found online at http://journals.cambridge.org terranean endemic plants is in progress. However, there has not been sufficient research examining the extent to which global criteria are applicable to small geographical regions such as islands (Martin, 2009). Although there has Introduction been some research on individual taxa (de Montmollin & Strahm, 2005; Fenu et al., 2011, 2012), few projects have used 5 000 he Mediterranean region, with almost , islands the IUCN categories to assess the status of endemic flora for 2005 Tand islets (de Montmollin & Strahm, ), is known regional red lists (Domínguez Lozano et al., 1996; Médail & for its high plant diversity and is recognized as one of Verlaque, 1997; Trigas et al., 2008) and few have focused on 34 2004 Global Biodiversity Hotspots (Mittermeier et al., ). entire archipelagos (Costion et al., 2009; Martin, 2009). The Conservation Working Group of the Italian Botanical fl BRUNO FOGGI (Corresponding author), DANIELE VICIANI,RICCARDO M. BALDINI Society has initiated an evaluation of the Italian ora to and TOMMASO GUIDI Department of Evolutionary Biology, Laboratory of Plant establish a National Red List (Rossi & Gentili, 2008). Several Biology, University of Florence, Via La Pira 4, I-50121 Florence, Italy fl E-mail bruno.foggi@unifi.it taxa of the endemic ora of the Tuscan Archipelago are listed in Conti et al. (1997) and Sposimo & Castelli (2005); however, ANGELINO CARTA Department of Biology, Botanic Garden, University of Pisa, Italy to date, only one species in the archipelago (Centaurea 2005 Received 14 July 2012. Revision requested 18 October 2012. gymnocarpa;Foggi, ) has been evaluated using the IUCN Accepted 20 February 2013. First published online 31 July 2014. criteria. Consequently, we started an extended work to assess © 2014 Fauna & Flora International, Oryx, 49(1), 118–126 doi:10.1017/S0030605313000288 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.33.42, on 27 Sep 2021 at 09:16:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0030605313000288 Endemic plants of the Tuscan Archipelago 119 Palmaiola Cerboli Formica Grande FIG. 1 The islands of the Tuscan Archipelago. The rectangle on the inset shows the location of the main map off km the coast of Italy. all the rare and vulnerable plants of the Tuscan Archipelago. was assessed using the IUCN criteria and guidelines Our aim here is to assess all the endemic vascular plants of the (IUCN, 2001, 2011). The species included those listed by Archipelago, based on IUCN criteria (2001, 2011), and Arrigoni et al. (2003), with the addition of Crocus ilvensis highlight threats to the flora in this territory. (Peruzzi & Carta, 2011). Contrary to a previous report (Fossi Innamorati, 1991), and in accordance with Frignani & Iiriti Study area (2011), Romulea insularis is considered an endemic species of Capraia Island. The Tuscan Archipelago comprises seven islands and c. 20 Three of the five IUCN criteria were employed. Criteria islets (Fig. 1). It originated with the rotation of the Cyrno– A and E were not used because there is insufficient Sardinian tectonic plate and the consequent evolution of the information to assess population dynamics or estimate the northern Apennine. The flora of the archipelago consists of minimum viable population. Three main types of infor- c. 1,400 taxa, 80% of which are herbaceous, reflecting the mation were available for assessment: distribution, popu- Mediterranean setting and the prevalence of secondary lation sizes and threats. forms of vegetation; 1.14% of the taxa are strictly endemic, most of which are related to Cyrno–Sardinian elements, Distribution data suggesting that the Tuscan Archipelago is a biogeographical bridge between the floristic Cyrno–Sardinian dominion The distribution data were obtained from field surveys, and the Italian peninsula. The landscape of the region has museum collections (only records from 2005 onwards were changed significantly over recent decades as the traditional used) and a georeferenced phytosociological database of economy based on pastoralism, forestation and cultivation . 1,000 relevés and permanent plots (from the Laboratory has given way to an economy based mostly on tourism of Plant Biology, Department of Biology, University of (Papayannis & Sorotou, 2008). Florence). For herbarium specimens and information from phytosociological relevés (mainly collected for vegetation 2006 2008 2011 Methods mapping; Foggi et al., , , a; Foggi & Pancioli, 2008; Viciani et al., 2011) we discarded all records with a . 500 fi Species georeferencing uncertainty of m. We conducted eld surveys during 2007–2010, from early spring to late summer, The conservation status of the 16 plant taxa (species and to investigate the species localities reported in the historical subspecies) endemic to the Tuscan Archipelago (Table 1) floristic bibliography on the area, check for species presence © 2014 Fauna & Flora International, Oryx, 49(1), 118–126 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.33.42, on 27 Sep 2021 at 09:16:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0030605313000288 120 B. Foggi et al. data, complete the distribution information, count mature individuals, detect typical habitats of the different taxa, and identify threats and pressures. We recorded the geograph- ical coordinates of each individual, using a global position- Habitat (92/43 ECE) 8220 1240 3170* 3170*/6220* ing system, to an accuracy of ± 10 m. All geographical data were plotted using ArcGis v. 10 (ESRI, Redlands, USA). The distribution information was used to compute Extent of Occurrence and Area of Occupancy of each species, following the IUCN guidelines for applying 2011 Formica Grande di Grosseto x 1240 criterion B (IUCN, ). Extent of Occurrence was obtained by delimiting a polygon that encompassed all the known localities of a taxon. For species that occurred on several islands (e.g. Linaria capraria) the polygon was computed /EEC). with the exclusion of the sea areas between islands (IUCN, 43 / 2011). Area of Occupancy was calculated by overlaying a 92 2 4 km Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) grid on the maps and summing the areas in which each species was located. Because of the narrow distributions of the species and the detail of spatial information available we also 2 calculated the Area of Occupancy using a grid of 1 km . 2 A 1 km grid can be used for assessment when high- precision data are available (IUCN, 2011). The Extent of Occurrence was often lower than the Area of Occupancy for narrowly distributed species. In such cases the Extent of Occurrence was taken to be equal to the Area of Occupancy (IUCN, 2011).
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