Pierangela Angelini

European Green Deal and Biodiversity Strategy have recently boosted the need of indicators and reference values for assessing the conservation status of habitat types. In this perspective, the development of efficient and effective evaluation methodologies is essential, and it should be reached also approaching new technologies for data collection such as Robotics driven monitoring. Robotics is an innovative tool not yet fully explored in biodiversity monitoring, but with a promising future. To develop these technologies, the task of vegetation science is to present its needs for effective monitoring activities.

Current approaches are mainly related to the recording of the occurrence of indicator species (fauna and flora) that are supposed to be typical of a given habitat. However, in diversity rich habitat types, this approach may miss the evaluation of ecosystem functioning, that translates environmental characteristics into services provided by natural ecosystems, weakening the consistence of the current monitoring programs promoted by the EU policies. On the contrary, the complete analysis of the vegetation, by the combination of different methods and tools for data collection, can shed light both on taxonomical and functional composition, developing more effective indicators.

We propose here a case study on grasslands monitoring, with an approach focused on the persistence of typical plant species assemblage of open landscapes as reference values of favourable conservation status for seminatural grasslands. We presume that the first colonization on mountains, shepherds have selected natural open landscapes for pastoralism, having maintained and spread grasslands over time. We refer to communities that satisfy one of the following conditions: i) the ones closer to the primary condition; ii) the ones have been used as pastures for a long time. We called them “old-growth grasslands”.

We identify functional traits typical of grasslands or indicating pastoralism, to define the so called “grasslands species”, expecting that species common, frequent or characteristic of grasslands biomes (steps or alpine tundra), or species indicating long pastoral history will be more represented in habitat in good conservation status. We also considered ruderals (including invasive species), indicating habitat degradation, which will be more represented in habitat in poor conservation status, and species of conservation concern, to highlight the main threatened areas.

We analysed about 700 vegetation plots belonging to seminatural grasslands habitat in Central Italy to test for different assemblages of the proposed functional traits and we suggested potential threshold values that could be the reference for protected grassland of Central Italy. These assemblages of species can be considered as clear objectives and operational targets for cost-effective and semiautomatic monitoring activities allowing comparative and standardized procedures among Member States.