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Based on the analysis of both historical and recent collections, this paper reports an annotated list of taxa which are new to the lichen biota of Italy or of its administrative regions. Specimens were identified using a dissecting and a compound microscope; routine chemical spot tests and standardized thin-layer chromatography (TLC or HPTLC). The list includes 225 records of 153 taxa. Twenty taxa are new to Italy, the others are new to one or more administrative regions, with 15 second records and 5 third records for Italy. Some of the species belong to recently-described taxa, others are poorly known, sterile or ephemeral lichens which were largely overlooked in Italy. Several species are actually rare, either because of the rarity of their habitats (e.g. old-growth forests), or because in Italy they are at the margins of their bioclimatic distribution. The picture of the lichen biota of Italy has now new pixels, but its grain is still coarse. Further analysis of historical collections, increased efforts in the exploration of some areas, and the taxonomic revision of critical groups are still necessary to provide more complete distributional data for new biogeographic hypotheses, taxonomic and ecological research, and biodiversity conservation.

In this contribution, new data concerning bryophytes, fungi, and lichens of the Italian flora are presented. It includes new records and confirmations for the bryophyte genera Aneura, Aulacomnium, Dumortiera, Fossombronia, Hennediella, Hygrohypnella, Pohlia, Porella, Riccardia, Tortella, and Tortula, the fungal genera Cortinarius, Mycena, Naucoria, Trichoglossum, and Tubaria and the lichen genera Agonimia, Blastenia, Chaenotheca, Cladonia, Endocarpon, Gyalecta, Lecanographa, Parmeliella, Porpidia, Stenhammarella, and Thelidium.

In the original publication of the article the 8th author name was misspelt and now the correct name is provided in this correction and the original article has been corrected.

I castagneti da frutto di antico impianto e con alberi secolari sono un habitat raro (e fragile) nel paesaggio appenninico e di elevato pregio perché, oltre ad avere valenze storico-culturali e paesaggistiche, supportano una elevata biodiversità e costituiscono un rifugio per specie rare o in declino. La gestione degli alberi monumentali e del sottobosco ha un ruolo chiave per il mantenimento o recupero dell’habitat e la salvaguardia della biodiversità ad esso connessa. Contestualmente, va riconosciuto il contributo insostituibile dato dai castanicoltori nella tutela dell’habitat.

I castagneti di antico impianto sono un habitat di importanza conservazionistica a livello europeo. In Appennino ci sono esempi di tali castagneti che ospitano alberi secolari. Questi ultimi, non solo testimoniano la lunga storia dell'impianto e la sua complessa relazione con l'uomo, ma possono costituire un rifugio per specie epifite rare o in declino. Nelle provincie di Bologna e Modena, attraverso informatori chiave e lo snow ball sampling sono stati individuati 20 castagneti (13 gestiti) con prevalenza di alberi secolari. Nei siti sono stati valutati la condizione degli alberi (incluso lo stato fitosanitario), la biodiversità vegetale e l’abbondanza di licheni target. I risultati evidenziano il ruolo centrale della gestione tradizionale nel preservare l'habitat e la biodiversità.

Italy is among the European countries with the greatest plant diversity due to both a great environmental heterogeneity and a long history of man–environment interactions. Trait-based approaches to ecological studies have developed greatly over recent decades worldwide, although several issues concerning the relationships between plant functional traits and the environment still lack sufficient empirical evaluation. To draw insights on the association between plant functional traits and direct and indirect human and natural pressures on the environmental drivers, this article summarizes the existing knowledge on this topic by reviewing the results of studies performed in Italy adopting a functional trait approach on vascular plants, bryophytes and lichens. Although we recorded trait measurements for 1418 taxa, our review highlighted some major gaps in plant traits knowledge: Mediterranean ecosystems are poorly represented; traits related to belowground organs are still overlooked; traits measurements for bryophytes and lichens are lacking. Finally, intraspecific variation has been little studied at community level so far. We conclude by highlighting the need for approaches evaluating trait–environment relationship at large spatial and temporal scales and the need of a more effective contribution to online databases to tie more firmly Italian researchers to international scientific networks on plant traits.

International audience; The exploration of the patterns and the mechanisms that shape organisms distribution along large latitudinal gradients is among the most debated topics in ecology and biogeography due to its implications for conservation in the face of global change. In Europe, beech forests cover a vast surface area, from the southern part of Scandinavia to the mountains of south Italy, providing relatively homogeneous habitat conditions along this latitudinal gradient. This should be reflected by a high similarity in taxonomical composition of its forest biota. However, this hypothesis could be contradicted by the fact that the large-scale distribution of organisms may be hampered by their dispersal capability. This could determine differences in organism spread patterns across European beech forests that should be reflected by a pattern of distance decay of compositional similarity whose magnitude should depend on the dispersal traits of the organisms. To test this hypothesis we assembled a multi-taxon database, including both organisms that are best suited for long-range dispersal (i.e. birds, bryophytes, lichens, fungi) and organisms that are usually less effective in long range dispersal (i.e. beetles and plants). This database consists of 354 plots clustered in 20 forest areas distributed from northern France to southern Italy. Preliminary results reveal a pattern of distance decay of compositional similarity for all organism groups. However, its magnitude reflects the dispersal ability of the organisms, being stronger for those that are less suited for long range dispersal. Only for lichens, results are not consistent with our expectations showing a high rate of compositional dissimilarity over a relatively short distance (i.e. 500 Km). This may reflect their strong sensitivity to local microclimatic conditions. More refined results are expected by an extra close-to-trait analysis considering more in detail the dispersal capability of the single species within each taxonomical group.

International audience; Understanding how forest biodiversity and carbon stocks can be simultaneously maintained or enhanced is crucial for the development of effective forest management strategies and policies aimed at halting biodiversity loss under climate and land use change. Many existing policies and strategies assume that forests hosting high carbon stocks provide co-benefits in terms of high biodiversity. While this relationship has been demonstrated in tropical forests, it has not been rigorously assessed in temperate forests, and further research is needed to understand how carbon stock and biodiversity covary, and whether non-linearities, community thresholds and variability across taxa exist. We built a comprehensive biodiversity dataset including six taxonomical groups (beetles, birds, bryophytes, fungi, lichens, and vascular plants) distributed over 352 plots representing three forest types, in 22 distinct study areas across three European countries (France, Hungary and Italy). We used Boosted Regression Trees and Threshold Indicator Taxa ANalysis (TITAN) to address three questions: (1) is there a positive relationship between overall multi-taxa diversity (multidiversity) and aboveground carbon stocks in European temperate forests? (2) Are there nonlinearities or thresholds (e.g. synchronous change-points in species composition) along the carbon stock gradient we considered, and are they consistent across taxonomical groups and forest types? (3) How do individual species respond to increasing aboveground carbon and how does the proportion of species with positive (win-win species) or negative (trade-off species) relationships vary across taxonomical groups? We found neither higher multidiversity, nor a consistently higher number of species across the six taxonomical groups in forests storing higher aboveground carbon. We found evidence for synchronous change-points in community composition along the carbon gradient, although these were neither consistent, nor equally abrupt across taxonomical groups and forest types. For all taxonomical groups except lichens, trade-off species markedly decreased at carbon stocks between 80 and 110 Mg/ha, roughly corresponding to the canopy closure phase of the forest stand development. The turnover between trade-off and win-win species was gradual along the carbon gradient, and the proportion of these two groups of species varied across taxonomical groups, and forest types. Maximizing forest carbon storage may not benefit all facets of biodiversity at the same time, although it may enhance some specific taxa and functional groups. Explicitly distinguishing between win-win and trade-off species, and considering taxon-specific community change-points along the carbon gradient could provide a conceptual basis for forest managers to operatively reconcile biodiversity conservation and carbon stock retention.

International audience; Scale dependency is one of the main factors causing the variability of correlations among species diversity parameters. Recent syntheses demonstrated how both extent (the geographical area comprised by the survey or total sample) and grain (the scale of each sampling unit) have a significant effect on cross-taxon congruency. These results, however, do not represent a definitive framework to understand this variation across spatial scales, since this was only indirectly analyzed, by comparing the results of different studies. Our goal is to assess if and how cross-taxon congruency vary across different spatial scales in European temperate forests. Our general hypothesis is that cross-taxon congruency in species richness and composition in European temperate forests increases together with the scale of analysis. We account separately for differences in spatial grain and extent, and evaluate the relationships between all the possible pairs of taxonomic groups. We use a comprehensive set of field data encompassing Italy, France and Hungary (Fig. 1), and including species diversity information for six taxonomic groups: vascular plants, bryophytes, birds, epiphytic lichens, saproxylic beetles, and wood-inhabiting fungi. We calculated effect sizes for species richness and community composition correlation at three different spatial scales of grain and extent: (i) plot grain - site extent, (ii) plot grain - continental extent, and (iii) site grain - continental extent. No pair of taxa had their species richness consistently correlated (either positively or negatively) in all three combinations of grain and extent analyzed (Fig. 2). However, birds and bryophytes, and fungi and lichens had the highest correlation of species richness when sampled at a plot-level grain and site extent. When analyzing congruent patterns of species composition, plants resulted as the best surrogates for other taxa, even across different spatial scales (Fig. 3). We demonstrate that diversity congruency relationships among taxa in European temperate forest are for the most part, scale-dependent. Our results support that increasing database extent and sampling grain masks local patterns of congruency and highlights those due to common response to broad environmental and biogeographic factors that covary across the European continent. We suggest the results presented in this study to be taken into serious consideration when developing indicators of sustainable forest management for the conservation of forest biodiversity.

International audience; Managing forests sustainably is important to preserve biodiversity and the services it underpins, above all climate change mitigation through the storage of carbon in woody biomass. Biodiversity conservation and carbon storage strictly depend on forest structure, and many scientists advocate for a higher degree of structural complexity in order to increase the provision of these ecosystem services. However, a thorough understanding of the trade-offs and synergies between forest biodiversity, structure and function is still lacking especially due to the scattered and inadequate information on the distribution of forest biodiversity, whose sampling and monitoring are particularly complex and costly. By establishing a network of scientists who collected data in European deciduous forests, we were able to create a dataset including information on forest structure and six taxonomic groups (vascular plants, lichens, bryophytes, fungi, beetles and birds) for more than 350 sampling units across France, Hungary and Italy. We used these data to test the following hypotheses: i) a higher degree of forest structural heterogeneity results in higher levels of multi-taxon biodiversity; ii) forest stands containing a high amount of carbon stored in tree aboveground biomass re also those hosting a high degree of multi-taxon biodiversity.