Plant Biodiversity and Evolution in Mountain Areas

Dear Colleagues,

Diversity is a distinctive sign of nature and a basic element of ecological stability. Identifying and preserving biodiversity is crucial for planning conservation policies and environmental resource management, and is addressed by United Nations as one of the key challenges of a new sustainable development agenda for the next decades.

Plants diversity is crucial for maintaining ecosystem balance, safeguarding watersheds, reducing erosion, regulating climate, and giving animals a place to live. In mountain areas, the interaction of abiotic (climate, geology, and morphology) and biotic factors together with the effects of paleoclimatic and paleogeographic vicissitudes results in a very diversified pattern of plant ecosystems, often associated with a high rate of species richness, endemism, and rare species. In fact, numerous plant species exhibit a distribution range limited to mountainous regions, displaying complicated patterns of differentiation, geographic or ecological vicariance, often characterized by endemic genetic lineages.

Despite the knowledge acquired to date on high altitude flora and vegetation, many montane areas still remain semi-unknown, due to both the objective lack of studies and the difficulty in reaching the survey sites and implementing field sampling campaign.

On the other hand, factors such as abandonment of traditional land use, the rising human population, pollution, and especially climate change represent a real threat to plant diversity, which is progressively decreasing in mountain areas all over the world. In fact, mountain ecosystems are extremely vulnerable to global change, and the recent ongoing warming is gradually transforming mountain plant communities. For instance, the southern European and Mediterranean mountain ranges are currently subjected to a progressive elevation of the altitudinal bioclimatic belts that is putting at risk the survival of the subalpine and alpine belt plant communities rich in circumboreal or arctic–alpine relic species linked to the effects of the last glaciation.

However, to put into practice the right precautions to limit the loss of plant biodiversity taking place in mountain areas, it is first necessary to have as complete a picture as possible of what the elementary components of this biodiversity are. It is evident, therefore, that knowledge of the specific composition, distribution, dynamics, and functioning of the montane areas’ plant species and communities becomes a priority in order to carry out effective and suitable strategies for their conservation.

This Special Issue focuses precisely on the importance of carrying out studies able to fill the gaps of knowledge on the flora and vegetation of montane areas. Predicting the relationships between the patterns, processes, and properties of mountain plant communities is fundamental to uncovering the mechanisms driving their functional and structural components and improving the predictive capacity for their future evolution.  In this specific setting, the application of plant functional features can serve as valuable instruments for investigating the variations in ecotypes and flexibility of morphological, physiological, and evolutionary traits. These studies could aid in identifying those species, species collective groups, or plant communities most at risk of extinction or significant shrinkage of their range, as well as those that are likely to adapt to the current global change.

Prof. Dr. Paola Fortini
Guest Editor

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• biodiversity
• biogeography
• biosystematics
• mountain flora and vegetation
• phytosociology
• plant communities
• functional traits