ID: 613 / 130

Category: Symposia

Track: Pending

Proposed Symposium Title: FILLING THE GAPS IN THE CATALOGUING OF ALIEN FLORAS IN THE MEDITERRANEAN BASIN

Abstract: The Mediterranean Basin, one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots, has a history marked by the emergence of civilizations and trade commerce with other areas. Although agriculture has always been one of the most important activities in the Mediterranean, the basin’s landscape is today dramatically affected by the growth of urban areas and the impact of tourism, but also by overgrazing and deforestation. In addition, the Mediterranean Basin, with a population approaching 500 million, will be one of the regions of the world most affected by climate change. All these factors, together with the exceptional richness of topography, vegetation, and climate, make the Mediterranean Basin one the world’s regions with the highest invasion potential and, thus, a priority area to study the impact of plant invasions. In spite of this, the Mediterranean Basin is still a relatively poorly studied area in terms of its alien floras, particularly when compared with central Europe or Australia/New Zealand. While some Mediterranean regions are still lacking floristic surveys on alien plant species (especially in the countries of the southern shore of the sea), others are in need of urgent updates of their alien species checklists. Even in the countries/regions where complete and comprehensive catalogs of alien plants are available, there are still many gaps of knowledge, such as delimiting those areas more susceptible to plant invasions, identifying the most affected native species and communities by alien plants, or designing efficient tools for the early detection and a prioritization of potentially invasive species. This symposium is aimed to explore the most recent advances in the cataloguing of alien plants in the Mediterranean Basin and to reveal the gaps in their knowledge, with the final objective of identifying those areas of research that should be promoted in the coming years.

Speaker 1: - Gianluigi Bacchetta (MALE) - Full professor, University of Cagliari (Italy) - bacchet@unica.it - “Towards a complete and updated knowledge of exotic flora in Sardinia: diversity, ecology and activities for their control”

Speaker 2: - Salma Shaltout (FEMALE) - Lecturer, Tanta University (Egypt) - salma.shaltout@science.tanta.edu.eg - “Distribution and history of the wild alien species in the Egyptian flora”

Speaker 3: - Ioannis Bazos (MALE) or Margarita Arianoutsou (FEMALE) - Laboratory Teaching Staff (I. Bazos) or Professor (M. Arianoutsou), Kapodistrian University of Athens (Greece) - ibazos@biol.uoa.gr/marianou@biol.uoa.gr - “The alien plant species of Greece: new insights”

Topics (Up to three): Conservation Biology

Topic 2: Floristics

Topic 3: Global Change Ecology

Justification: Invasive alien species are already considered the second cause of biodiversity loss and, sadly, the threat that they represent might considerably increase in the near future as the global change is consolidating; indeed, some recent studies show that the volume of the world’s naturalized flora is growing at astonishing rates (with doubling times <20 years). Therefore, we believe that including a symposium on this issue within the IBC is highly justified, while it fits well within the topics that the IBC will cover (alien plants are essential to topics 1, 3, 7, 10, 14, 16, 24, and 29).