Catalogo dei Corsi di studio

My research focuses on the analysis of plant community composition and plant species diversity in response to environmental, historical and human factors.
During my PhD in Botany, I investigated the effect of fragmentation, historical factors and human disturbances on the plant diversity of the woodlands embedded in the agricultural landscape around the city of Rome.
After receiving the PhD, I started to be involved in International Cooperation Projects about nature conservation in different biogeographical regions of the world. I worked three years in the arid sub-tropical Socotra Archipelago (Yemen), in the framework of UNDP and Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs projects for developing the Sustainable Development Plan of the islands. For this purpose, I analysed the composition of the plant communities and the environmental/human factors affecting their distribution and carried out specific research on the most important endemic species. I am now involved in a new project there, for the conservation of Boswellia endemic trees.
I ve been involved in the National Forest Inventory of Papua New Guinea (funded by FAO) for three years, for developing and testing in the field a methodology to assess plant taxonomic-structural-functional diversity of the tropical rain forests. The project is still ongoing and I m now collaborating in the production of scientific publications using plant data that we collected, but also multi-taxonomic analysis merging zoological (birds, insects) and pedological data collected by other international teams.
For several years I worked in the Balkan region, mainly Albania, in the framework of different international projects funded by the European Union, IUCN and the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, all focusing on the design and establishment of Protected Areas and the Natura 2000 network. The intensive phytosociological exploration of Albania allowed the publication of several papers and I will soon develop a synthesis of the vegetation of the country.
Thanks to the precious data collected during the exploration of this under-studied regions, I joined important international repository of plot data (EVA, GIVD, S-Plot) and I am currently involved in several research activities arose from there about the analysis of large database for investigating biogeographical patterns of taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic diversity at large scale (continental-global).