Data Paper |
Corresponding author: Marta Latini ( marta.latini@uniroma1.it ) Academic editor: Lorenzo Peruzzi
© 2020 Emanuele Fanfarillo, Marta Latini, Mauro Iberite, Giovanna Abbate.
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Citation:
Fanfarillo E, Latini M, Iberite M, Abbate G (2020) The segetal flora of Italy: an occurrence dataset from relevés in winter cereals and allied crop types. PhytoKeys 161: 107-118. https://doi.org/10.3897/phytokeys.161.53915
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The segetal flora of winter crops includes mostly native or archaeophyte annual species that are often strong specialists of their habitats. Threatened by the intensification of agriculture, segetal flora is particularly valuable from a perspective of biodiversity conservation and evolution. Moreover, it contributes to maintain biodiversity in agroecosystems and provides several ecosystem services. The dataset here described was set up to provide the first inventory of the segetal flora of Italian winter cereal crops and allied crop types, the latter including flax and autumn-sown legumes. It includes 24,676 georeferenced occurrence data deriving from 1,240 floristic and phytosociological relevés. The data were collected from the greater part of Italian territory, in a temporal range spanning from 1946 to 2018.
weed, agriculture, agroecosystem, arable flora, archaeophyte, observation, wheat, winter annual crop
The concept of “weed” is very subjective, as any plant that interferes with human activities can be considered as such, implying the existence of agricultural weeds, environmental weeds, ruderal weeds and many others. Weeds of arable land are almost exclusively annual and are called “agrestals” or “segetals” (
The here presented dataset is available in GBIF (
In the light of what is stated above, the main aims of the present paper are the description and presentation of this recently-released dataset, providing information on its usefulness and possible future applications.
Plant biodiversity in traditional agroecosystems of Italy: a floristic and ecological multi-scale analysis based on geodatabases.
RM118164361D0EE4 (Progetto di Ricerca Medio, Sapienza University of Rome).
Giovanna Abbate, Mauro Iberite, Marta Latini, Emanuele Fanfarillo
Sapienza University of Rome, Piazzale Aldo Moro 5, 00185, Rome, Italy.
The disappearance of traditional agroecosystems and the consequent biodiversity loss due to changes in agriculture are receiving increasing attention in Europe. The use of databases on plant taxonomical, distributional, ecological and functional traits is of crucial importance in conservation actions. The need to improve monitoring and reporting activities by improving the quality of biodiversity data is also underlined by the European Biodiversity Strategy. This project aimed at fulfilling a global analysis of the plant diversity existing in the traditional agroecosystems of Italy, knowledge of which is currently lacking, by means of the collection, digitisation and processing of original and archival data. The proposed actions concerned: the preparation of thematic databases on segetal flora and vegetation, including the features of plant species and communities; the analysis of data at different spatial and temporal scales; the production of thematic maps on plant diversity and its related topics; the development of new methods to estimate the nature value of agroecosystems; the detection of bio-indicator plant species for floristic richness, agricultural intensity and environmental quality. Special attention was given to winter arable plants and communities, currently at high risk of disappearance in Europe. The achieved results provided an important basis for any future research, with special regards to the definition of conservation strategies for plant diversity in European rural areas.
The occurrence data were retrieved through extensive literature searches and intensive field samplings, the latter being carried out in the greater part of Italy to fill the knowledge gaps in some geographic areas. Literature data were selected using a habitat-based criterion: only the records for taxa unambiguously reported to grow in winter cereals, flax and autumn-sown legumes were collected. Consequently, all the records with no or with generic information on the growing habitat (e.g. “fields” or “cultivated land”) were excluded. Likewise, records of taxa identified to the genus or higher level, doubtful identifications, nomenclatural ambiguities and crop species were not considered. The bibliographic source of each record is available upon request to the authors.
All the occurrence data were georeferenced. Geographic coordinates (decimal latitude and decimal longitude), geodetic datum and a value of uncertainty for coordinates were attributed to each single record. The geographic coordinates were manually attributed, based on the descriptions of the relevé location provided in the original source. If coordinates were already available, they were converted in WGS84 geodetic datum, when differently expressed. The uncertainty of geographic positions was estimated according to the 9-degree scale defined by
The taxonomic nomenclature was updated according to the latest standards available for the Italian flora (
The dataset was validated using GBIF Data Validator (https://www.gbif.org/tools/data-validator) and was published using GBIF Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT) publishing platform (https://cloud.gbif.org/eca). Once the data were imported in GBIF, the nomenclature was automatically referred to the GBIF Backbone Taxonomy (
Object name: Darwin Core Archive Segetal flora of Italy
Character encoding: UTF-8
Format name: Darwin Core Archive format
Format version: 1.0
Distribution: https://cloud.gbif.org/eca/archive.do?r=segflorit
Publication date of data: 09-07-2020
Language: English
Licences of use: Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 License
Metadata language: English
Date of metadata creation: 09-04-2020
Hierarchy level: Dataset
The fields provided by the “Segetal flora of Italy” dataset are:
occurrenceID, basisOfRecord, eventDate, scientificName, kingdom, taxonRank, decimalLatitude, decimalLongitude, geodeticDatum, coordinateUncertaintyInMetres, continent, country, countryCode, stateProvince, organismQuantity, organismQuantityType.
Most of the records belong to the class Magnoliopsida (20,307 records; 82% of the total), followed by Liliopsida (4,208 records; 17%) and Polypodiopsida (117 records; 0.5%). Though, on the basis of the most recent results summarised by the APG (
Within Magnoliopsida, the most represented orders are Asterales (15%), Ranunculales (12%), Caryophyllales (11%) and Fabales (8%). Poales (14%) is the most represented order within Liliopsida. The records in the dataset belong to 53 families, 340 genera and 859 taxa. The five most represented families, genera and species are shown in Tables
The five most represented families in the “Segetal flora of Italy” dataset: number of records, percentage of records, number of genera and number of species are reported for each family.
Family | No. records | % of records | No. genera | No. species |
---|---|---|---|---|
Poaceae | 3,468 | 14.1 | 46 | 100 |
Asteraceae | 3,100 | 12.6 | 69 | 126 |
Fabaceae | 1,925 | 7.8 | 19 | 95 |
Apiaceae | 1,658 | 6.7 | 30 | 43 |
Papaveraceae | 1,582 | 6.4 | 3 | 12 |
The five most represented genera in the “Segetal flora of Italy” dataset: family, number of records, percentage of records and number of species are reported for each genus.
Genus (Family) | No. records | % of records | No. species |
Papaver (Papaveraceae) | 1,243 | 5.0 | 5 |
Veronica (Plantaginaceae) | 690 | 2.8 | 12 |
Lysimachia (Primulaceae) | 689 | 2.8 | 3 |
Ranunculus (Ranunculaceae) | 656 | 2.7 | 11 |
Lolium (Poaceae) | 641 | 2.6 | 4 |
The five most represented species in the “Segetal flora of Italy” dataset: family, number of records and percentage of records are reported for each species.
Species (Family) | No. records | % of records |
Papaver rhoeas L. (Papaveraceae) | 917 | 3.7 |
Convolvulus arvensis L. (Convolvulaceae) | 564 | 2.3 |
Ranunculus arvensis L. (Ranunculaceae) | 496 | 2.0 |
Lysimachia arvensis (L.) U.Manns & Anderb. (Primulaceae) | 466 | 1.9 |
Polygonum aviculare L. (Polygonaceae) | 429 | 1.7 |
Kingdom: Plantae
Phylum: Tracheophyta
Class: Magnoliopsida, Liliopsida, Polypodiopsida.
Order: Alismatales, Apiales, Asparagales, Asterales, Boraginales, Brassicales, Caryophyllales, Cucurbitales, Dipsacales, Equisetales, Ericales, Fabales, Gentianales, Geraniales, Lamiales, Liliales, Malpighiales, Malvales, Myrtales, Oxalidales, Piperales, Poales, Polypodiales, Ranunculales, Rosales, Salviniales, Santalales, Saxifragales, Solanales.
Family: Amaranthaceae, Amaryllidaceae, Apiaceae, Araceae, Aristolochiaceae, Asparagaceae, Asteraceae, Boraginaceae, Brassicaceae, Campanulaceae, Caprifoliaceae, Caryophyllaceae, Convolvulaceae, Cucurbitaceae, Cyperaceae, Dennstaedtiaceae, Elatinaceae, Equisetaceae, Euphorbiaceae, Fabaceae, Gentianaceae, Geraniaceae, Heliotropiaceae, Hypericaceae, Iridaceae, Juncaceae, Lamiaceae, Liliaceae, Linaceae, Lythraceae, Malvaceae, Marsileaceae, Onagraceae, Orobanchaceae, Oxalidaceae, Papaveraceae, Plantaginaceae, Poaceae, Polygonaceae, Portulacaceae, Primulaceae, Ranunculaceae, Resedaceae, Rosaceae, Rubiaceae, Santalaceae, Saxifragaceae, Scrophulariaceae, Solanaceae, Thymelaeaceae, Urticaceae, Verbenaceae, Violaceae.
The species occurrences stored in the dataset were recorded from the greater part of the Italian territory (Fig.
Number and percentage of records per administrative region in the “Segetal flora of Italy” dataset.
Administrative region | No. records | % on the total |
Sicily | 6035 | 24.5 |
Veneto | 2680 | 10.9 |
Lombardy | 2480 | 10.1 |
Latium | 2086 | 8.4 |
Emilia-Romagna | 1797 | 7.3 |
Abruzzo | 1785 | 7.2 |
Marche | 1725 | 7.0 |
Umbria | 1652 | 6.7 |
Calabria | 1120 | 4.5 |
Basilicata | 692 | 2.8 |
Molise | 648 | 2.6 |
Friuli Venezia Giulia | 559 | 2.3 |
Tuscany | 396 | 1.6 |
Piedmont | 373 | 1.5 |
Sardinia | 298 | 1.2 |
Campania | 249 | 1.0 |
Trentino-Alto Adige | 74 | 0.3 |
Liguria | 27 | 0.1 |
The dataset includes species occurrences recorded from 1946 to 2018 (Fig.
As expected, a high seasonality characterises the dataset. Most of the occurrences were recorded in spring and early summer. The months of greatest occurrence of the investigated taxa are, respectively, June, May, July and April (Fig.
The “Segetal flora of Italy” dataset was the basis for the definition of the first inventory of the segetal flora of Italian winter cereal crops and allied crop types (
We thank the reviewers for their substantial improvement to the first version of the manuscript.