Italy’s Botanical Map Redrawn: New Plant Records, Extinctions and Two New Names

A quiet but consequential update to Italy’s botanical inventory has just been published in the journal Italian Botanist, and it reshapes what scientists know about where the country’s native vascular plants actually grow. The contribution, the twenty-first in an ongoing series of floristic notulae, assembles dozens of new records, confirmations and exclusions spanning sixteen genera, from umbrella-bearing Angelica and parasitic Cuscuta to alpine hawkweeds of the notoriously difficult genus Hieracium. Alongside the distributional news, the paper formally proposes two new nomenclatural combinations, one in the grass genus Festuca and one in the buttercup family relative Anemone, reflecting how modern molecular phylogenetics keeps forcing classical taxonomy to rearrange its furniture. For a country whose flora is among the best documented in Europe, the sheer volume of corrections in a single paper is a reminder that even a well-mapped continent still hides surprises, and that the difference between a species present and a species absent often hinges on a single herbarium sheet collected a century ago.

The most dramatic of the new records concerns Lomelosia micrantha, a small member of the honeysuckle family that had never before been confirmed for Italy. The story began in 2008, when plants found along the Taro river in Emilia-Romagna were identified as Lomelosia stellata and celebrated as a species new to the national flora. That identification, initially confirmed by a Spanish specialist on the basis of photographs, was later questioned on an online botanical forum, where Valerio Lazzeri suggested the plants might instead belong to L. micrantha. Fresh fieldwork and a careful re-examination of herbarium specimens have now settled the debate. The diagnostic characters are subtle but decisive: the involucel-corona, a cup-like structure surrounding the flower, is significantly narrower in L. micrantha, and the involucral bracts are entire rather than frequently divided as in L. stellata. The consequence is a double correction, an exclusion of one species and the addition of another, and a remarkable biogeographic fact, because the Taro river population of roughly one hundred individuals represents the westernmost known locality of a species whose range otherwise stretches from the central Balkan Peninsula to central Asia.

Equally striking is the fate of the orchid Orchis patens subsp. brevicornis, reported for the first time in Emilia-Romagna from a dry, shrubby grassland near the Passo del Pellizzone in the province of Parma. This orchid has a disjunct distribution that reads like a biogeographic puzzle: it occurs in northern Africa along the Algerian-Tunisian Atlas and in north-western Italy, while the Canarian populations are now treated as a separate species, O. canariensis. Until now, the Italian plants were known only from Liguria. The new population consists of just nine individuals scattered over fifteen square metres, but its position changes the known envelope of the species in two directions at once. It is the highest recorded locality, the first above one thousand metres of elevation, and the northernmost point of the entire species range. Records like this matter beyond national checklists, because range edges are precisely where climate change and habitat alteration leave their fingerprints first, and a population of nine plants on a south-facing slope is as fragile as it is scientifically valuable.

The Apennine hawkweeds and their relatives dominate the paper’s regional novelties. No fewer than seven subspecies of Hieracium, a genus famous among botanists for its apomictic reproduction and bewildering morphological variation, are newly recorded for the Veneto region, nearly all from the Dolomites of the province of Belluno. Hieracium caesium subsp. brennerianum was found at two sites in the Cadore valley, H. dentatum subsp. pseudoplantagineum and H. froelichianum subsp. subvulsum on siliceous rock pastures between the Fedaia and Padon passes at around two thousand metres, H. diaphanoides subsp. diaphanoides and H. levicaule subsp. pseudosenile at forest margins in Comelico Superiore, and H. pallescens subsp. ovale on limestone rocks near Feltre at a surprisingly low two hundred and fifty metres. Each determination was made or confirmed by the specialist Gottschlich, whose expertise is essential in a group where species boundaries are drawn with characters as fine as the hairiness of flower stalks.

One hawkweed record stands out as a genuine national first. Hieracium cydoniifolium subsp. trichanthodium was collected in August 2024 in thinned subalpine coniferous forest on Marteller granite in the Vinschgau valley of South Tyrol, at just over two thousand metres, and it is new for the flora of Italy as a whole. The subspecies had previously been known only from the Swiss cantons of Valais, Bern and Grisons, so its discovery on the Italian side of the Alps extends its range southward across the watershed. Morphologically it sits in an awkward transitional position: it closely resembles Hieracium prenanthoides but is much hairier on the peduncles than any subspecies of that species, representing what the authors describe as a first step toward it. In apomictic groups, where seeds are produced without sexual recombination and each variant can persist essentially unchanged, such transitional forms are exactly the material from which new species eventually crystallize, which is why documenting them precisely, with specimens deposited in public herbaria, is more than bureaucratic housekeeping.

The paper also performs some botanical detective work that erases species from regional lists, and these exclusions are arguably as important as the additions. In Campania, Lophiolepis morisiana, a thistle relative, has been struck from the flora. The trail of evidence is tangled: a nineteenth-century record by Martelli and Tanfani actually referred to Cirsium eriophorum, a later citation of a Matese lake locality was erroneous, and the key record from the Partenio massif published in 1989 is not supported by any specimen in the Naples herbarium. Meanwhile, the similar Lophiolepis lacaitae, which was never reported by those authors, does in fact occur in the same massif. A parallel correction concerns Pimpinella anisoides in Puglia. The species had entered the national checklist on the strength of records from the Murgia plateau, but re-examination of the original 1949 specimen collected by Scaramuzzi, and of a second specimen from Alberobello, showed that both plants are in fact Ammoides pusilla, a different umbellifer entirely. Two misidentified herbarium sheets had quietly sustained a phantom population for more than seventy years.

Not all corrections are exclusions; some are rehabilitations. Lamium album, the white dead-nettle, is newly recorded for Lazio on the basis of two collections, one from a beech-forest clearing on Monte L’Inversaturo dating back to 1992 and another from tall-herb grassland on Monte Pelone in the Monti della Laga made in 2024. The species had been regarded as wrongly reported for the region, but the diagnostic characters cited in the classic 1989 monograph of the genus, an oblique internal ring of hairs inside the corolla and light yellow pollen grains, distinguish it from the superficially similar L. maculatum. Similarly, Potentilla verna has been confirmed for Lazio from mesophilous grasslands near Amatrice, a region scarred by the 2016 earthquakes, despite recent regional floras omitting it and earlier authors dismissing past records as erroneous. In Basilicata, Trifolium mutabile subsp. gussoneanum was confirmed on volcanic soils near Rionero in Vulture, vindicating a record first made in 1948 and clarified through successive revisions of a 1930s specimen.

Range extensions for Apennine endemics add another layer of significance. Senecio apenninus, a ragwort recently re-evaluated as endemic to the central Apennines, where it is widespread in Marche, Umbria, Lazio and Abruzzo, has now been found in the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines between Monte Paitino and Monte Sillara and near Cima Canuti, at elevations around seventeen hundred metres. The discovery shifts the northern limit of its range considerably. Its relative, Senecio nemorensis subsp. apuanus, was recorded for the first time in Emilia-Romagna near the Cerreto pass, both at a beech-forest margin and along the Secchia river in grey-alder riparian woodland, echoing populations known from the Tuscan side of the same pass. Elsewhere, Angelica sylvestris was confirmed for Puglia in the Monti Dauni, Cuscuta palaestina subsp. palaestina, a stem parasite, was found in an abandoned olive grove in the Maremma regional park as a new record for Tuscany, Dianthus rupicola subsp. rupicola appeared on volcanic cliffs of the island of Ponza as new for Lazio, Origanum onites turned up in a disused limestone quarry near Gallipoli as new for Puglia, and Thalictrum simplex subsp. tenuifolium was confirmed in a Piedmont wetland near Cesana Torinese, close to a historical Sestrière locality now almost certainly lost to the development of the ski resort after 1935.

Three Mediterranean woody species also changed their legal-botanical status in the north. Ficus carica, the common fig, was found colonizing the interstices of a stone retaining wall under a motorway overpass in Collegno near Turin, where plants of several ages form a stable, fruit-bearing population, justifying a change from casual to naturalized alien in Piedmont. Even more impressive is Laurus nobilis, the bay laurel, discovered inside the Brich di Zumaglia nature reserve in the Biella Alps: more than one hundred individuals in two generations, with mature plants six to eight metres tall, growing beneath a mixed canopy of eastern white pine, Norway spruce and sweet chestnut, alongside an undergrowth rich in cherry laurel. On the Molise coast, within a Natura 2000 site at the Saccione river mouth, a population of about fifty oleander individuals in the back-dune zone, plus scattered plants elsewhere along the shore, marks Nerium oleander subsp. oleander as a naturalized alien new for that region. Such status changes feed directly into invasion biology assessments, since naturalized species are the pool from which future invasive ones emerge.

Finally, the nomenclatural novelties show taxonomy in motion. Anemone alpina subsp. austroalpina is a new combination that moves a taxon formerly placed in Pulsatilla into Anemone, following recent molecular work showing that Anemone, in its broad sense, forms a well-supported clade that swallows Pulsatilla and a string of smaller genera. And Festuca × stacei, the hybrid between red fescue and Vulpia myuros, receives a new combination under Festuca because phylogenetic treatments now regard Vulpia as merely a synonym of Festuca, rendering the old hybrid genus name Festulpia obsolete. The paper closes with an extensive supplementary file of nomenclatural and distributional updates and corrigenda drawn from dozens of recent publications, underscoring that this series functions as a living correction service for the Italian flora. Every record, whether a nine-plant orchid on an alpine pass or a misidentified specimen from 1949, passes through the same pipeline: a documented collection, a deposited specimen, and a specialist’s determination, the unglamorous machinery that keeps a national flora honest.

Subject of Research: Updates to the distribution and taxonomy of Italy's native vascular flora

Article Title: Notulae to the Italian native vascular flora: 21

Article References: Bartolucci, F., Domina, G., Adorni, M., Alessandrini, A., Ardenghi, N. M. G., Argenti, C., Banfi, E., Bonari, G., Bonivento, E., Cantini, D., Cerbone, P., de Francesco, M. C., De Vivo, R., Del Guacchio, E., Di Pietro, A., Di Pietro, R., Forte, L., Galasso, G., Gennaio, R., … Lastrucci, L. (2026). Notulae to the Italian native vascular flora: 21. Italian Botanist, 21, 237-253. https://doi.org/10.3897/italianbotanist.21.203684

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/italianbotanist.21.203684

Keywords: Italian flora, vascular plants, floristic records, Hieracium, Orchis patens, Lomelosia micrantha, nomenclature, herbarium specimens, range extension, naturalized alien species, Apennines, plant taxonomy