engleski

Ongoing discoveries of rare plants in Croatia

According to the Flora Croatica Database, Croatian flora so far includes 5722 plant taxa, which is a rather high number considering the corresponding area. Although the distribution of the majority of taxa is well documented, rare taxa are often poorly known. Native rare taxa are most commonly documented in historical literature, while recent data are absent or very scarce. Alien taxa may be rarely recorded due to the short residence time, or low speed of spread. Within the course of different botanical studies, we have encountered some of the rarely documented plants such as Frankenia pulverulenta L., Vincetoxicum fuscatum (Hornem.) Rchb. f., Quercus trojana Webb, Lemna minuta Kunth, Reynoutria sachalinensis (F. Schmidt) Nakai, Sporobolus pungens (Schreb.) Kunth, Veronica peregrina L., Crocus thomasii Ten. and Petasites kablikianus Tausch ex Bercht., gaining new insight into their occurrence in Croatia. These findings are of great importance for the conservation of rare natives, and early detection and better understanding of spread of rare aliens. Given that loss of biodiversity starts with rare species, specific studies and continuous field searches and visits to historical localities of rare taxa are needed in order to keep the track of the status of Croatian plant diversity.

Conservation, distribution, new records, new aliens

nije evidentirano