Plant Conservation Programmes in the Apennine Botanical Reserves

Campo Imperatore Alpine Botanical Garden, central Apennines. One of the primary ex situ conservation sites for endemic plants of the Gran Sasso massif. Image: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA.

The Apennine mountain chain, running the length of the Italian peninsula from Liguria to Calabria, contains one of the highest concentrations of endemic vascular plant species in Western Europe. Many of these endemics have narrow altitude ranges, specific geological substrate requirements, and small total population sizes — characteristics that make them vulnerable to the combination of habitat loss, climate change, and competing land uses that have accelerated across the range since the mid-20th century.

Conservation responses have developed across several institutional levels, from national park authorities managing in situ habitat, to university botanical gardens maintaining ex situ collections, to cooperative seed-banking initiatives coordinating between multiple institutions. This article documents the main programme types and their operational status as of early 2026.

The Legislative Framework

Italy's national protected areas system includes several parks that overlap with major botanical hotspots in the Apennines: the Gran Sasso e Monti della Laga National Park, the Majella National Park, the Cilento, Vallo di Diano, and Alburni National Park, and the Aspromonte National Park in Calabria. Each park authority is legally mandated to protect the flora within its boundaries, but the specific mechanisms — whether active propagation programmes, habitat management, or strict non-intervention zones — vary between parks and between administrations over time.

Italian national law on plant species protection (D.P.R. 357/1997, implementing the EU Habitats Directive) provides the list of protected plant species, but implementation of active conservation measures has been uneven. Botanical gardens affiliated with universities have, in several cases, been more consistent operators of ex situ programmes than the park authorities themselves.

Ex Situ Conservation: Seed Banking

The most systematic ex situ conservation effort for Apennine flora currently operating is the seed banking activity coordinated through the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation framework and implemented in Italy partly through the Banca del Germoplasma at the University of Catania and the seed collections maintained at Campo Imperatore and other alpine stations.

Seed banking for wild plant conservation differs from agronomic seed banking in several respects. Seeds of wild species, particularly those from alpine and sub-alpine habitats, often have specific dormancy requirements — temperature cycling, scarification, or prolonged cold stratification — that must be met before germination will occur. Protocols for each species have to be established individually; there is no universal germination protocol applicable across the diversity of Apennine endemic flora.

As of the most recent published surveys, seed collections for approximately 180 endemic or nationally threatened Apennine plant species have been established. Coverage is uneven, with the best-represented groups being those of the central Apennines (Gran Sasso, Majella) and the Calabrian Apennines. The Ligurian and northern Apennines remain less well covered.

Ex Situ Conservation: Living Collections

Several botanical gardens maintain living collections specifically for conservation purposes, as distinct from the general taxonomic collections that most gardens hold. These conservation collections are subject to more stringent provenance documentation: accessions must be traceable to specific wild populations, and collection records should note population size, health, and the number of individuals from which seed or vegetative material was taken (to preserve genetic diversity).

The Campo Imperatore garden maintains living ex situ collections of several central Apennine endemics including Adonis distorta, a small buttercup-family plant restricted to rocky limestone outcrops above 1,700 m on the Gran Sasso and Majella massifs, and Aquilegia magellensis, a columbine species with a natural range of only a few square kilometres in the Majella. Both are included on Italy's national list of protected species.

In Situ Habitat Management

Ex situ conservation is a backstop, not a primary conservation strategy. The goal of both seed banks and living collections is to prevent extinction while conditions for in situ population recovery are established — not to replace wild populations indefinitely. In situ work in the Apennines focuses on several identified threats:

• Overgrazing and changed grazing regimes — Traditional transhumance patterns have changed significantly, with some areas now overgrazed relative to historical norms and others now undergrazed, allowing scrub encroachment on formerly open grassland habitats.
• Invasive plant species — Several introduced species have spread in disturbed habitat edges within the national parks, including Robinia pseudoacacia and various introduced grass species that compete with native forb communities.
• Tourism and infrastructure pressure — The Gran Sasso area in particular has significant ski infrastructure and summer tourism, with associated trampling and disturbance pressure on sensitive habitats near access routes.
• Altitude shift due to climate change — Documented shifts in the altitude of vegetation zones have been recorded in the central Apennines, with montane and sub-alpine zones moving upward at rates consistent with the observed temperature increases across the range.

Reintroduction Programmes

Botanical gardens have conducted several reintroduction trials in the Apennines, returning propagated plants to suitable habitat within national park boundaries. The documented record is mixed. Successful reintroductions require not only viable plant material but appropriate receiving habitat — free from the threats that caused the original decline — and, ideally, ongoing monitoring over several years to assess whether planted populations become self-sustaining.

A reintroduction trial for Aquilegia magellensis conducted in the Majella National Park in the early 2010s resulted in establishment of a small additional population at a site where the species had not been recorded for several decades. The population was still present as of the most recent survey in 2023, though its long-term persistence has not been confirmed. This is a more positive outcome than several other Apennine reintroduction trials, which failed within one to three growing seasons due to grazing pressure or habitat change at the target site.

The Role of Botanical Garden Networks

Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI) and the European network of botanical gardens (ENSCONET, now integrated into the broader IPEN framework) provide coordination and shared protocols for seed banking and ex situ conservation. Italian gardens participating in these networks benefit from standardised documentation formats and access to germination protocol databases that reduce the time needed to develop new protocols for unstudied species.

The practical constraint on Italian participation in these networks is not methodological but resource-based: several university botanical gardens that could contribute to conservation programmes are operating with staff numbers insufficient to maintain their existing collections, let alone expand into conservation-specific work. The long-term strength of the Italian botanical network is substantially dependent on sustained institutional funding, which has been inconsistent across the past two decades.