Conservation Genetics of Four Critically Endangered Greek Endemic Plants: A Preliminary Assessment

Abstract

The Mediterranean basin constitutes one of the largest global biodiversity hotspots, hosting more than 11,000 endemic plants, and it is recognised as an area with a high proportion of threatened taxa. Nevertheless, only a tiny fraction of the threatened Mediterranean endemics have their genetic diversity assessed, and we are unaware if and how climate change might impact their conservation status. This is even more pronounced in Eastern Mediterranean countries with a rich endemic flora, such as Greece, which hosts a large portion of the plant taxa assessed at the European level under the IUCN criteria. Using inter simple sequence repeats (ISSR) markers and species distribution models, we analysed the genetic diversity and investigated the impacts of climate change on four critically endangered and extremely narrow and rare Greek island endemic plants, namely Aethionema retsina, Allium iatrouinum, Convolvulus argyrothamnos, and Saponaria jagelii. All four species are facing intense anthropogenic threats and display moderate genetic diversity (uHe: 0.254–0.322), while climate change is expected to have a profound impact on their range size during the coming decades. A combination of in- and ex-situ measures, such as population reinforcement and seed bank conservation, are urgently needed in order to preserve these highly threatened and rare Greek endemics.

Assessing the Vulnerability of Medicinal and Aromatic Plants to Climate and Land-Use Changes in a Mediterranean Biodiversity Hotspot

“…These findings align with recent meta-analyses showing that climate change disproportionately threatens endemic species [189] and with the fact that climate and land-use change affect more the limited ability of endemic taxa to disperse and adapt to new conditions [190][191][192]. This also concerns Greece's unique biodiversity and the ecological challenges several of the Greek endemics and the range-restricted taxa occurring there face [22,36,92,193,194]. In contrast, at least initially, most non-endemic MAP taxa are projected to undergo range expansions within the Chelmos-Vouraikos National Park (Tables S4, S5 and S8; Figures 2, S2 and S3).…”

Conservation Responsibility for Priority Habitats under Future Climate Conditions: A Case Study on Juniperus drupacea Forests in Greece

“…We have to note, however, that our projections are somewhat conservative, given that the most important drivers of the species' distribution are temporally static soil variables, namely the cation exchange capacity of the soil and the proportion of clay particles in the fine earth fraction for the CC and the CC-LULCC models, respectively. Nevertheless, soil variables are susceptible to alteration due to evolving (micro-) climatic conditions in the forthcoming decades (see [91][92][93][94][95]). This implies that Juniperus drupacea might encounter even more substantial shifts in its geographical range in the future than the ones we have predicted herein.…”

Assessment of pollution at the former uranium waste dumpsite near kaji-Say Village/Kyrgyzstan: a genetic and physiological investigation

“…Here, ISSR-PCR analysis was used for identification of possible mutations. By ISSR technique, using primers generated by binary, triple, quadruple, and quaternary nucleotides can be used for amplifying a region between two microsatellite sites and the resulting PCR products can be determined after staining with ethidium bromide on agarose gels (Boopathi, 2020;Kougioumoutzis et al, 2021).…”