Juncus atratus Krock. (Juncaceae) rediscovered in Italy: a species deserving urgent conservation actions
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Juncus atratus Krock. (Juncaceae) rediscovered in Italy: a species deserving urgent conservation actions Federica Bonini 1 & Lorenzo Lastrucci 2 & Daniela Gigante 1 Received: 25 November 2019 / Accepted: 26 March 2020 # Plant Science and Biodiversity Centre, Slovak Academy of Sciences 2020
Abstract The conservation status of plant species is an important tool for their effective conservation, but it has been evaluated only in a low number of taxa up to now. In this frame, the national assessment of Juncus atratus Krock., a Central European-South Siberian wet meadow species, is here provided. J. atratus is a rare and threatened species in Central Europe and has been listed as Regionally Extinct in the only Italian Region where it was previously known. The species has recently been rediscovered in Italy, in a different area (Castel S. Maria plain, Umbria Region), and at present, this is the only confirmed known location at national scale. An overview of its ecological and distributive characteristics is presented, considering both bibliographic sources and new data including its phytosociological context in the study area. According to the IUCN Criteria, the species is here ascribed to the category Critically Endangered (CR). The case of J. atratus is an emblematic example of the difficulty of providing exhaustive and reliable extinction risk assessment when knowledge on the species distribution is not complete. Keywords Biodiversity . Conservation status . IUCN assessment . Juncus atratus . Red lists . Rediscovery . Wet meadows
Introduction In Europe, the first assessment of the European Vascular Plants has evaluated 1826 species out of more than 20,000 known taxa (Bilz et al. 2011), selected considering only the plants listed under European or international regulations, i.e. Habitats Directive 92/43/CEE (European Community 1992), Bern Convention (Council of Europe 1979), CITES (CITES Secretariat 2011), Crop Wild Relatives (CWR) and particular aquatic plant species. Although largely insufficient, these assessments can be considered as a direct outcome of the Convention on Biological Diversity (2010), which emphasized their importance for the conservation of plant species. The IUCN Categories and Criteria (IUCN 2012, 2019a) are the global standards to assess the extinction risk of taxa (De Grammont and Cuarón 2006; Rodrigues et al. 2006; Hoffman
* Daniela Gigante [email protected] 1
Department of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Sciences (DSA3), University of Perugia, Perugia, Italy
2
University Museum System, Natural History Museum of the University of Florence, Botany, via La Pira 4, 50121 Florence, Italy
et al. 2008; Le Breton et al. 2019). There is obviously a long way to achieve an exhaustive amount of assessed taxa, although, in the last few years, relevant improvements have been done: the review of progress toward the target showed that in 2017, only 6.5% of plant species had been assessed at the global level using the IUCN standards (Sharrock et al. 2018), while to date
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