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    Between global priorities and local urgencies: the Important Plant Areas programme in Italy

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    Global priorities for the conservation of biodiversity assume a key role in determining the national priorities and the research agenda. The "Important Plant Areas in Italy" project, promoted by the Italian Ministry for the Environment, Nature Protection Directorate through a programme aimed at mapping the IPAs, represents an important contribution to the planning of strategies designed to enhance biodiversity conservation. The national working group, co-ordinated by the Inter-university research centre for "Biodiversity, Plant sociology and Landscape ecology" of the "Sapienza" University of Rome and composed of a network of 100 botanical experts was set up to obtain original information and draw up a detailed, nationwide picture of the situation in Italy. Important Plant Areas were identified on the basis of a range of taxonomic groups (such as vascular plants, bryophytes, freshwater algae, lichens and fungi) and habitats in order to promote an integrated model of knowledge for the conservation of plant diversity. Each of the selected vascular plants and habitats was assigned a conservation value on a regional basis. An approach based on the overlapping of the species and habitat maps was used to identify the most important areas for plant diversity and to pinpoint any "hotspots" of richness and diversity. Hence, polygons were defined within the cells of high conservation value and/or containing high vascular species and habitat richness (grid approach). A total of 320 IPAs were identified in Italy (including 8 fresh water algae community sites), covering approximately 15% of the country. Regional results highlighted the extreme heterogeneity of available data and the need for new basic research projects designed to integrate and update the information currently available on the distribution of plant species (vascular plants, bryophytes, freshwater algae, lichens), fungi and habitats in our country. Considering the global emerging issues but acting at local level, the results yielded by this project may be exploited for interventions of various kinds, ranging from the choice of protected areas to urban planning

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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