Ecological features facilitating spread of alien plants along Mediterranean mountain roads.

Unlabelled: Invasive alien species represent a major threat to global biodiversity and the sustenance of ecosystems. Globally, mountain ecosystems have shown a degree of resistance to invasive species due to their distinctive ecological features. However, in recent times, the construction of linear infrastructure, such as roads, might weaken this resistance, especially in the Mediterranean basin region.

Intraspecific variability of leaf form and function across habitat types.

Trait-based ecology has already revealed main independent axes of trait variation defining trait spaces that summarize plant adaptive strategies, but often ignoring intraspecific trait variability (ITV). By using empirical ITV-level data for two independent dimensions of leaf form and function and 167 species across five habitat types (coastal dunes, forests, grasslands, heathlands, wetlands) in the Italian peninsula, we found that ITV: (i) rotated the axes of trait variation that define the trait space; (ii) increased the variance explained by these axes and (iii) affected the functional structure of the target trait space. However, the magnitude of these effects was rather small and depended on the trait and habitat type.

Best practices, errors, and perspectives of half a century of plant translocation in Italy.

Conservation translocations are becoming common conservation practice, so there is an increasing need to understand the drivers of plant translocation performance through reviews of cases at global and regional levels. The establishment of the Italian Database of Plant Translocation (IDPlanT) provides the opportunity to review the techniques used in 186 plant translocation cases performed in the last 50 years in the heart of the Mediterranean Biodiversity Hotspot. We described techniques and information available in IDPlanT and used these data to identify drivers of translocation outcomes.

Distance decay 2.0 - A global synthesis of taxonomic and functional turnover in ecological communities.

Aim: Understanding the variation in community composition and species abundances (i.e., β-diversity) is at the heart of community ecology.

Can functional genomic diversity provide novel insights into mechanisms of community assembly? A pilot study from an invaded alpine streambed.

An important focus of community ecology, including invasion biology, is to investigate functional trait diversity patterns to disentangle the effects of environmental and biotic interactions. However, a notable limitation is that studies usually rely on a small and easy-to-measure set of functional traits, which might not immediately reflect ongoing ecological responses to changing abiotic or biotic conditions, including those that occur at a molecular or physiological level. We explored the potential of using the diversity of expressed genes-functional genomic diversity (FGD)-to understand ecological dynamics of a recent and ongoing alpine invasion.

Accounting for stochasticity in demographic compensation along the elevational range of an alpine plant.

Demographic compensation arises when vital rates change in opposite directions across populations, buffering the variation in population growth rates, and is a mechanism often invoked to explain the stability of species geographic ranges. However, studies on demographic compensation have disregarded the effects of temporal variation in vital rates and their temporal correlations, despite theoretical evidence that stochastic dynamics can affect population persistence in temporally varying environments. We carried out a seven-year-long demographic study on the perennial plant Arabis alpina (L.

Plant invasion alters trait composition and diversity across habitats.

Increased globalization has accelerated the movement of species around the world. Many of these nonnative species have the potential to profoundly alter ecosystems. The mechanisms underpinning this impact are often poorly understood, and traits are often overlooked when trying to understand and predict the impacts of species invasions on communities.

Simulating plant invasion dynamics in mountain ecosystems under global change scenarios.

Across the globe, invasive alien species cause severe environmental changes, altering species composition and ecosystem functions. So far, mountain areas have mostly been spared from large-scale invasions. However, climate change, land-use abandonment, the development of tourism and the increasing ornamental trade will weaken the barriers to invasions in these systems.

Will climate change increase hybridization risk between potential plant invaders and their congeners in Europe?

Aim: Interspecific hybridization can promote invasiveness of alien species. In many regions of the world, public and domestic gardens contain a huge pool of non-native plants. Climate change may relax constraints on their naturalization and hence facilitate hybridization with related species in the resident flora.

Extreme climate events counteract the effects of climate and land-use changes in Alpine treelines.

1. Climate change and extreme events, such as drought, threaten ecosystems worldwide and in particular mountain ecosystems, where species often live at their environmental tolerance limits. In the European Alps, plant communities are also influenced by land-use abandonment leading to woody encroachment of subalpine and alpine grasslands.

What it takes to invade grassland ecosystems: traits, introduction history and filtering processes.

Whether the success of alien species can be explained by their functional or phylogenetic characteristics remains unresolved because of data limitations, scale issues and weak quantifications of success. Using permanent grasslands across France (50 000 vegetation plots, 2000 species, 130 aliens) and building on the Rabinowitz's classification to quantify spread, we showed that phylogenetic and functional similarities to natives were the most important correlates of invasion success compared to intrinsic functional characteristics and introduction history. Results contrasted between spatial scales and components of invasion success.

Darwin's naturalization hypothesis: scale matters in coastal plant communities.

Darwin proposed two seemingly contradictory hypotheses for a better understanding of biological invasions. Strong relatedness of invaders to native communities as an indication of niche overlap could promote naturalization because of appropriate niche adaptation, but could also hamper naturalization because of negative interactions with native species ('Darwin's naturalization hypothesis'). Although these hypotheses provide clear and opposing predictions for expected patterns of species relatedness in invaded communities, so far no study has been able to clearly disentangle the underlying mechanisms.

The fate of threatened coastal dune habitats in Italy under climate change scenarios.

Coastal dunes worldwide harbor threatened habitats characterized by high diversity in terms of plant communities. In Italy, recent assessments have highlighted the insufficient state of conservation of these habitats as defined by the EU Habitats Directive. The effects of predicted climate change could have dramatic consequences for coastal environments in the near future.

Effects of trampling limitation on coastal dune plant communities.

Sandy coastlines are sensitive ecosystems where human activities can have considerable negative impacts. In particular, trampling by beach visitors is a disturbance that affects dune vegetation both at the species and community level. In this study we assess the effects of the limitation of human trampling on dune vegetation in a coastal protected area of Central Italy.