New Evidence on the Distribution of the Highly Endangered and Implications for Its Conservation.

The critically endangered Cyprus grass snake () has been studied for the past 25 years. Although the need for a complete survey on the distribution of its population, outside the strict boundaries of the known mountainous localities, had been stressed, such an effort has not been conducted to date. In this study, we used a rapid survey approach to investigate possible sightings of the species upstream of the known distribution in the Troodos Mountains.

Influence of the habitat altitude on the (proto)hypericin and (proto)pseudohypericin levels of hypericum plants from Crete.

Environmental factors are known to influence strongly the accumulation of secondary metabolites in plant tissues. In a previous paper, we studied the contents of (pseudo)hypericin and its immediate precursors in wild populations of various HYPERICUM species on the island of Crete, Greece, in dependence on their developmental stage. In this study, we investigated the effect of the habitat altitude on the total hypericins content of the plants, which is defined as the sum of protohypericin, hypericin, protopseudohypericin and pseudohypericin.