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By virtue of its ecological and floristic diversity, the Pollino National Park plays a key role for biodiversity conservation in the Mediterranean context. The historical interest of botanists for this areas has provided a lot of descriptive information on its flora and vegetation. Nonetheless, data concerning the effects of current environmental transformations (i.e. land-use changes, climate warming) on local plant richness are still poor. For this reason, the Ente Parco Nazionale del Pollino has promoted a long-term monitoring plan to investigate biodiversity variations in orophylous herbaceous vegetation under two experimental scenarios: absence of grazing, and climate warming. To date, two years of observation revealed significant but contrasting responses in plant communities well differentiated by ecological and floristic features. To better understand the biodiversity variations caused by the experimental regime, the monitoring trials need to be continued over a longer timeframe.

Summary The taxa of the genus Paeonia in Italy need a thorough rearrangement of their taxonomy and geographical distributions. The genus Paeonia has always shown bearing many controversies since it was establishment by Linnaeus (1753), who perceived the close relationships between the two units he described. Several authors have successively amended the genus. At the present, the Italian peonies are recognized essentially by the morphological features of their leaves; but usually the shape, the size and the number of leaf-segments is variable in the same population. On account of this, there were, in the past, a lot of uncertainties and some mistakes in their classification. The present study is based on both living populations and the dried collections of several herbaria; field investigation through continental Italy, Sardinia and Sicily was carried out by bio- metrical analyses and was supported by laboratory analysis and bibliographical investigations. As a result, we have identified: Paeonia peregrin...