| Titre : | What is a tree in the Mediterranean Basin hotspot? A critical analysis (2019) |
| Auteurs : | Frederic Medail, Auteur ; Anne-Christine Monnet, Auteur ; Daniel Pavon, Auteur ; Toni Nikolic, Auteur ; Panayotis Dimopoulos, Auteur ; Gianluigi Bacchetta, Auteur ; Juan Arroyo, Auteur ; Zoltán Barina, Auteur ; Marwan Cheikh Albassatneh, Auteur ; Gianniantonio Domina, Auteur ; Bruno Fady, Auteur ; Vlado Matevski, Auteur ; Stephen Mifsud, Auteur ; Agathe Leriche, Auteur |
| Type de document : | Article |
| Dans : | Forest Ecosystems (6 March, 2019) |
| Article en page(s) : | 17-17 |
| Mots-clés: | Biodiversity ; Mediterranean |
| Résumé : | BackgroundTree species represent 20% of the vascular plant species worldwide and they play a crucial role in the global functioning of the biosphere. The Mediterranean Basin is one of the 36 world biodiversity hotspots, and it is estimated that forests covered 82% of the landscape before the first human impacts, thousands of years ago. However, the spatial distribution of the Mediterranean biodiversity is still imperfectly known, and a focus on tree species constitutes a key issue for understanding forest functioning and develop conservation strategies.MethodsWe provide the first comprehensive checklist of all native tree taxa (species and subspecies) present in the Mediterranean-European region (from Portugal to Cyprus). We identified some cases of woody species difficult to categorize as trees that we further called cryptic trees. We collected the occurrences of tree taxa by administrative regions, i.e. country or large island, and by biogeographical provinces. We studied the species-area relationship, and evaluated the conservation issues for threatened taxa following IUCN criteria.ResultsWe identified 245 tree taxa that included 210 species and 35 subspecies, belonging to 33 families and 64 genera. It included |



