Sara Landi

• PhD
• member at GREENARCO srl

Occurrence of protected and rare species is regarded as a strong argument for establishing protected areas and monitoring biodiversity, but while protected species are clearly identified, some problems exist to define rare species. It is thus important to know whether common and unprotected native species are reliable indicators for protected and r...

The Floristic Quality Analysis (FQA) is a method to assess the quality of a flora based on the assignment of scores to plant species and subsequent calculation of indices. This method is widely applied, but inadequate investigation has been devoted to test its potential problems due to human factors. This work is aimed to specifically test how the...

Despite the widely recognised importance of reserve networks, their effectiveness in encompassing and maintaining biodiversity is still debated. Species diversity is one of the most affordable measures of biodiversity, but it is difficult to survey such data over large scales. This research aimed to perform a sample-based assessment of species rich...

The spread of invasive alien plant species (IAPs) poses a serious threat to the biodiversity and effectiveness of rivers and drainage canals. Nevertheless, the reasons for the implications of increasing presence of IAPs on the stability and effectiveness of flood defences are still unclear. To point out the current knowledge on the topic, a systema...

The importance of collection, storage and exchange of georeferenced vegetation plot-based data has significantly grown in the recent decades, because of the new potentialities offered by ecoinformatics. In this article we introduce the Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna vegetation database (AMS-VegBank; GIVD code EU-IT-021) compiling 17,5...

The decline of freshwater flora due to alteration, reclamation and trophic perturbation of lowland wetlands is among the most relevant issues in biological conservation. The contribution of heavily modified water bodies (HMWBs) in preserving plant diversity is notable, but the underlying ecological mechanisms are not completely explored. To contrib...

Although coppice forests represent a significant part of the European forest area, especially across southern Countries, they received little attention within the Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) processes and scenarios, whose guidelines have been mainly designed to high forests and national scale. In order to obtain “tailored” information on th...

Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) indicators consider the main ecological and socioeconomic functions of forests but do not currently include some key groups widely adopted to assess the effects of forest management, such as herbaceous vascular plants, epiphytic lichens, and wood-decay fungi. Moreover, they are shaped into high forests while in t...

Species translocation can be considered as a primary conservation strategy with reference to in situ conservation. In the case of lichens, translocations often risk to fail due stress factors associated with unsuitable receptor sites. Considering the bioecological characteristics of lichens, air pollution is among the most limiting stress factors....

Freshwater plants loss is one of the preeminent issues concerning biodiversity conservation, due to the alteration of inland waters by water regulation and agricultural intensification. At the same time, data suggest a relevant contribution of artificial, lowland aquatic ecosystems in supporting plant diversity. However, the underlying ecological m...

Networks of protected areas are fundamental for biodiversity conservation, but many factors determine their conservation efficiency. In particular, on top of other human-driven disturbances, invasions by non-native species can cause habitat and biodiversity loss. Jointly understanding what drives patterns of plant diversity and of non-native specie...

The growing interest in emerging environmental crisis has increased the level of public attention and the willingness to take part in participatory science projects, commonly defined with the term “Citizen Science”. This phenomenon can be recorded globally in many national contexts, with a prevalence in anglophone and more industrialized countries....

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Aim: To date, despite their great potential biogeographical regionalization models have been mostly developed on descriptive and empirical bases. This paper aims at applying the beta-diversity framework on a statistically representative data set to analytically test the consistency of the biogeographical regionalization of Italian forests. Locati...

Forest management practices may heavily affect epiphytic cryptogams. This study was conceived in March 2016, as soon as we were informed about an authorized logging for timber within a Mediterranean mixed oak forest in Tus-cany (central Italy), which threatened a large population of the forest macro-lichen Lobaria pulmonaria (L.) Hoffm., composed o...

Unravelling patterns of species richness is a fundamental prerequisite to understand evolutionary and ecological dynamics, aiding to set efficient conservation activities. The Species–Area Relationship (SAR) is one of the most general patterns in ecology. Focusing on a Mediterranean area as case study, we investigated SAR and the drivers underlying...

Endemics–Area Relationships (EARs)are fundamental in theoretical and applied biogeography for understanding distribution patterns and promoting biodiversity conservation. However, calculating EARs for vascular plant species from existing data is problematic because of biased knowledge of endemic species distributions and differences between taxonom...

GrassPlot is a collaborative vegetation-plot database organised by the Eurasian Dry Grassland Group (EDGG) and listed in the Global Index of Vegetation-Plot Databases (GIVD ID EU-00-003). GrassPlot collects plot records (relevés) from grasslands and other open habitats of the Palaearctic biogeographic realm. It focuses on precisely delimited plots...

In land cover mapping, the complexity of landscapes is fitted into classes that may limit the recognition of natural variability. In this study, we tested the power of land cover classes (defined on the CORINE land cover classification scheme, a standardized legend set by EU for land cover inventory) to separate different vascular plant assemblages...

Although islands are model systems for investigating assembly of biological communities, long-term changes in archipelago communities are not well understood because of the lack of reliable data. By using a vast amount of floristic data we assembled a dataset of the plant species occurring on 16 islands of the Tuscan Archipelago, Italy, across two...

Background and aims – Exploring the role of mammalian carnivores as seed dispersers in Mediterranean environments is crucial for understanding biotic interactions and preserving mutualistic networks in areas with high biodiversity. We examine the potential role of the Sardinian fox (Vulpes vulpes subsp. ichnusae) as a seed-disperser of two juniper...

The identification of shape and size of sampling units maximising species richness has major implications in conservation planning and monitoring actions. In this study we tested the effect of three sampling unit shapes (rectangles, squared, and randomly shaped sampling units) on the number of recorded plant species. We used a large dataset gathere...

Landscape structure as well as local vegetation influence biodiversity in agroecosystems. A study was performed to evaluate the effect of floristic diversity, vegetation patterns, and landscape structural connectivity on butterflies (Lepidoptera: Papilionoidea and Hesperiidae), carabids (Coleoptera: Carabidae), syrphids (Diptera: Syrphidae), and sa...

Changes in land use are among the forces shaping Earth’s surface. In many industrialized areas, the loss of a traditional state of dynamic equilibrium between traditional management and natural dynamics is followed by abandonment to regeneration processes. This can reduce ecological complexity at the landscape scale and negatively affect biodiversi...

Since landscape attributes show different patterns at different spatial extents, it is fundamental to identify how the relation between landscape structure and plant species diversity at local scale varies with scale. Then, it is fundamental to assess the appropriate extent at which landscape factors affect plant species richness at the local scale...

AimAs a consequence of multiple cycles of deforestation and reforestation, most forest landscapes in Europe consist of a complex mosaic of patches of different successional ages. Despite the biogeographical distinctiveness of the Mediterranean region, studies on the effects of forest age on plant species diversity and composition are almost lacking...

VegItaly is at present the largest Italian vegetation database. It is the result of a collaborative project aspiring to represent a major reference for the Italian vegetation scientists. The paper emphasizes its benefits for phytosociological data management and describes the solutions adopted to solve several technical problems, like the treatment...

VegItaly is at present the largest Italian vegetation database. It is the result of a collaborative project aspiring to represent a major reference for the Italian vegetation scientists. The paper emphasizes its benefits for hytosociological data management and describes the solutions adopted to solve several technical problems, like the treatment...

Two years after its official start, the national vegetation database VegItaly, a collaborative project supported by the Italian scientific community and developed by a large group of scientists, is presented. The paper offers a concise overview of the content of the database, currently consisting of 31,100 vegetation-plot, including published and u...

Estimating the effects of the spatial components on species diversity represents an important step to establish the conservation “capacity” in a network of protected areas. A clear evaluation on how α, β, and γ diversity are partitioned among and within spatial (and temporal) scales can help us to drive manager decisions and provide methods for mon...