Forthcoming Special Issue

Special Collection on  Macrophytes in Italy: knowledge update on distribution, ecology, drivers and conservation status

Italy is a biodiversity hotspot at a European and global scale, hosting a rich variety of ecosystems and habitats. This is particularly true for freshwaters, which comprise a significant proportion of the inland water ecosystems found in the South European and Mediterranean region. However, at the national scale, for many freshwater systematic groups the level of knowledge available is inadequate to implement effective conservation and recovery programs. One example above all is aquatic plants, commonly known as macrophytes. They are fundamental to the functioning of colonized ecosystems, giving rise to a multiplicity of habitats and regulating the metabolism of colonized water bodies. In Italy, despite the well known high richness of macrophytes and the multiplicity of pressures to which they are subjected, this component is very poorly explored.

To improve the available knowledge on this topic, a national project called iMAD and funded by the NBFC (Spoke 3) began in November 2024. In the frame of this initiative, we are organizing a special issue of the Journal of Limnology focussing on “updating knowledge on the distribution of macrophytes in Italy, their ecology more generally, the drivers of their spatiotemporal patterns and the conservation status of rare/threatened taxa”, with the aim of creating a strong, mutual synergy. Contributions on the following topics are particularly encouraged:

  • Review and updating of distributional and ecological data of macrophytes.
  • Responses of macrophyte to natural and anthropic drivers.
  • Macrophyte functional investigation.
  • Analysis of the conservation status of macrophytes and conservation priorities.

We welcome manuscripts on any inland water and transitional ecosystems. Contributions from islands, mountainous areas and agroecosystems, also relating to protected areas or areas of particular biogeographical relevance, will be prioritized. Short Communications will be considered, only if they significantly increase knowledge on macrophytes at a national scale. Reviews are accepted by invitation only.

 

Guest Editors

Rossano Bolpagni, PhD
Department of Chemistry, Life Sciences and Environmental Sustainability, University of Parma, Italy. Rossano Bolpagni is a tenure-track researcher in Parma University at the Department of Chemistry, Life Sciences and Environmental Sustainability. His research is primarily in aquatic ecology and focuses on the reciprocal and multiple interactions between aquatic primary producers (mainly vascular and aquatic macrophytes) and their natural/human drivers. In particular, Rossano’s interests cover a range of issues, including: ecophysiological mechanisms regulating the diversity, performance, distribution (rarity) of macrophytes and aquatic habitats, as well as the development of innovative methodologies for their monitoring, including the application of functional and remote sensing techniques to study macrophytes (diversity, quality, adaptation to climate change), with the goal of integrating classical ecological approaches with monitoring of functional properties. Email: rossano.bolpagni@unipr.it

Angelo Troia, PhD
Department of Biological, Chemical and Pharmaceutical Sciences and Technologies, University of Palermo, Italy. Angelo is currently Associate Professor in Systematic Botany at the  Department of Biological, Chemical and Pharmaceutical Sciences and Technologies, University of Palermo. Angelo’s ongoing research is focused on the diversity, ecology and biogeography of plants, with a particular focus on the genus Isoetes, aquatic plants and habitats of inland waters, charophytes, the role of islands in the Mediterranean, and conservation issues. Email: angelo.troia@unipa.it

Mattia M. Azzella, PhD
Naturalist. Mattia M. Azzella holds a doctorate in ecology and is a former post-doc and researcher at La Sapienza University in Rome. He has always dealt with aquatic plants and has developed his main lines of research analysing the macrophytic biodiversity of Italian lakes, with a focus on volcanic lakes in the centre-south regions. He explored the relationship between macrophytes and ecological characteristics of lakes and developed the assessment index for the conservation status of volcanic lakes for the application of the Water Framework Directive. Mattia is expert on Charophytes, he is the national reference for monitoring habitat “3140 - Hard oligo-mesotrophic waters with benthic vegetation of Chara spp.”. He has recently conducted the monitoring required to update the conservation status of lentic habitats in the Lazio region, in the framework of the Habitat Directive. Email: mattia.azzella@gmail.com

Alice Dalla Vecchia, PhD 
Department of Chemistry, Life Sciences and Environmental Sustainability, University of Parma, Italy. Alice Dalla Vecchia is a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Parma, hosted by the McGill University, Montreal, Canada. Her research field is functional ecology of macrophytes. She primarily studies how intraspecifc trait variability helps understanding the responses of plants to environmental drivers. Her expertise includes modelling techniques to define the functional and ecological niches of species and the effect of environmental conditions on trait performance. She focuses on the resource-use strategies of threatened and invasive macrophytes, by analyzing leaf economics-related traits, as well as on structure and diversity of freshwater communities. She contributed to the devolpment of protocols for the measure of leaf traits in critical macrophyte groups. Email: alice.dallavecchia@unipr.it

Leonardo Rosati, PhD
Department of Health Sciences, University of Basilicata, Potenza, Italy. Leonardo Rosati is an Associate Professor of Environmental and Applied Botany at the University of Basilicata. His research interests span the diversity, distribution, and ecology of plant communities, encompassing vegetation classification and habitat mapping. Leonardo has a special interest in aquatic macrophytes, which serve as indicators of the conservation status of inland waters. In recent years, he has been specifically addressing macrophytic communities in artificial basins. Email: leonardo.rosati@unibas.it

 

Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts must be submitted online by registering and logging in here. A guide for authors and other relevant information are also available. Submissions to the Special Issue will open on May 1st 2025 and the dealine is set for February 28th 2026. Submitted manuscripts must neither have been published previously, nor simultaneously submitted for publication elsewhere. All submissions will pass pre-check by Editors and then they will be peer-reviewed by anonymous reviewers. Upon acceptance, the papers will be published continuously and listed on the special issue website. Please visit the Guidelines for Authors page before submitting a manuscript.

No Article Processing Charge (APC) for Open Access publication in the Special Issue is due.