Italy has a rich natural heritage, which is dangerously under pressure. In recent years, there is an increased awareness of the crucial role of plants in ecosystem functioning and in providing ecosystem services. Consequently, an updated Red List of the Italian vascular flora was compiled in this work, at the request of the Ministry for Environment, Land and Sea Protection, with the scientific support of the Italian Botanical Society. The IUCN Red List criteria were applied to 2,430 Italian native vascular plant taxa to assess their current extinction risk and to highlight the major threats affecting the Italian flora. Our results revealed that 54 taxa (2.2% of the assessed taxa) are extinct or possibly extinct at regional level, while 590 taxa (24.3%) were assigned to a risk category. Moreover, 404 taxa (16.6%) were categorized as Data Deficient. The Italian vascular flora is primarily threatened by habitat modifications due to anthropic disturbance and, especially, to agriculture, tourism and residential development. Coastal areas and lowlands, where anthropogenic impacts and ecosystem destruction are more pronounced, host the greatest number of extinct or declining taxa. Our results represent an important baseline to establish conservation priorities, legislative choices and intervention strategies on a national scale.

The conservation of species listed in the Bern Convention and European Directive 1992/43/EEC (so-called policy species) is mandatory for European Union (EU) countries. We assessed the conservation status of Italian policy species, based on the IUCN categories and criteria, to evaluate the effectiveness of existing protection measures at the national level. Among the 203 vascular plants, bryophytes and lichens evaluated, 41.9% are categorized as threatened, and one is already extinct, indicating that the protection measures for policy species are inadequate. Our results for the Italian policy species are consistent with those of an assessment at the EU level. Conservation priorities should be established at both the national and regional scales. An effective conservation strategy is needed, and in situ and ex situ actions focused on threatened species should be promoted.

The knowledge of the genetic architecture of closely related species and/or populations of a single species can be very useful to shed light on the processes that led to their current distributions. The present study provides a preliminary evaluation of the conservation status of the populations of Cryptotaenia thomasii, a very narrow endemic species occurring in southern Italy. Previous studies showed that C. thomasii was phylogenetically closely related to C. flahaultii, endemic species of Caucasus, and to evaluate its conservation status and the genetic variability of plant species the internal transcribed spacers (ITSs) of nuclear ribosomal DNA were sequenced and the SNPs were analyzed. The restriction analysis of nrDNA with the restriction enzymes allowed to detect the presence of two single mutations (SNPs) among the sequences of two species. Our molecular analysis pointed out that C. thomasii and C. flahaultii, in spite of their geographical disjunction, show a sign of an ancient contact as an extreme case of geographical disjunction Italian-Caucasus. From the evolutionary history of the species and its distribution pattern one can reconstruct a possible scenario with some hypotheses that explain the hypothetical ancestral area where the two species were in contact. We speculate the two species may have originated from fragmentation of a common ancestor widespread in the Western Palearctic zone and have survived in two separated refuge areas limited by important mountain systems. This hypothesis is supported by our molecular analysis, in fact, the analysis of SNPs showed that some C. thomasii populations retain the signs of an ancient link with C. flahaultii.