The city of Pisa is considered the cradle of modern botany: in 1543, during the Renaissance, the first academic botanical garden in the world was founded at the University of Pisa. However, despite this illustrious history, there has never been a complete list of all species and subspecies of vascular plants (ferns, conifers, flowering plants) that grow spontaneously in the Pisa area.
This gap was filled by a group of botanists from the University of Pisa – Lorenzo Peruzzi, Gianni Bedini and Jacopo Franzoni of the Department of Biology, and Iduna Arduini of the Department of Agricultural, Food and Agro-environmental Sciences – along with Brunello Pierini, a passionate scholar of the subject. The group conducted a study, recently published in the international journal Plants, which examined a total of 1404 species and subspecies, 112 of which alien, in the Pisa area.
“Despite the marked urbanisation of the area, we have documented significant floristic richness, with 33% more native species than expected,” says Lorenzo Peruzzi, Full Professor of Systematic Botany. “Unfortunately, however, alien species are also strongly represented, with 34.9% more than expected.”
From a conservation perspective, the inventory includes some endangered plants, most of which were found in the nature reserve of the Parco Naturale Regionale di Migliarino – San Rossore – Massaciuccoli. Specifically, there are four vulnerable species (Butomus umbellatus, Leucojum aestivum subsp. Aestivum, Ranunculus ophioglossifolius, Thelypteris palustris), nine endangered species (Anacamptis palustris, Baldellia ranunculoides, Cardamine Apenina, Centaurea aplolepa subsp. Subciliata, Hottonia palustris, Hydrocotyle vulgaris, Sagittaria sagittifolia, Solidago virgaurea subsp. Litoralis, Triglochin barrelieri) and one critically endangered species (Symphytum tanaicense).
All the work was based on existing literature and field observations recorded in the Wikiplantbase online database #Toscana and in iNaturalist.
“The problem of biological invasions is very significant in the Pisa area,” comments Iduna Arduini, Associate Professor of Environmental and Applied Botany, “among the 45 invasive alien species documented in the study, there are 4 species of union relevance, i.e. those whose negative impact is so serious that it requires coordinated and uniform action at the European Union level, and one species, Salpichroa origanifolia, which is locally very invasive”.
“The main source of the floristic data used is Wikiplantbase #Toscana,” continues Gianni Bedini, Full Professor of Systematic Botany, “a freely accessible floristic database from which we were able to extract 12,002 reports, available thanks to the efforts of numerous active collaborators, illustrating the crucial role played by the so-called Citizen Science in gathering important floristic information”.
“This work, in addition to taking stock of the floristic knowledge of the city, will also provide the basic data for the project IDEM FLOS, financed through a cascade grant call by the National Biodiversity Future Center, with the University of Trieste as the lead partner,” concludes Jacopo Franzoni, research fellow in Systematic Botany. “It will also allow us to build a tool for the identification of all these species, which will be made freely available to the local population by 2025.”