The botanists: “The risks linked to the introduction of species potentially harmful to ecosystems and biodiversity have been totally neglected.”
Editorial board
June 21, 2024
LAWN – Neophyte plants can become invasive and threaten biodiversity and ecosystems. There Italian Botanical Societythe Italian Society of Biogeography and the Italian Society of Vegetation Sciencethe cream of the scientific botanical community, rejects the “Bosco di Neofite”, the urban forestation intervention inaugurated at the end of May in the Tobbiana – Allende area in Prato.
The new urban park consists of approximately 150 trees and 400 shrubs distributed over a surface of 7,500 square meters. The intervention is part of the forestation process Forest City Lawn and was designed by the professor Stefano Mancuso and from Pnatspin-off of the University of Florence, in collaboration with the association Continuous Art and the Municipality of Prato. The objective is to create a green lung in an area particularly subject to traffic and pollution. All the plants were chosen by Stefano Mancuso based on their origin from different parts of the world.
But for botanists this is precisely the problem. “Neophyte plants are part of alien species” the associations explain in a joint note. This entails risks that cannot be overlooked: “They can become invasive and threaten biodiversity and ecosystems, competing with local species, significantly modifying the natural dynamics of the invaded ecosystems with cascading effects on the entire ecological network”.
What is happening with the blue crab should be thought-provoking: “Once introduced, many alien species can spread uncontrollablyrequiring expensive containment and eradication operations, with risks that are difficult to predict”.
Botanists also consider it unhappy communication strategy associated with the initiative, based onanalogy between human migrations and species translocations by man. “Complex social issues, such as immigration, and scientific issues, such as the management of alien species, must be treated with due respect for the different areas that distinguish them”.
Not to mention that “some of the species used in the project are well-known invasive neophytes in Europe (various species of the genus Eucalyptus, Quercus rubra, Robinia pseudoacacia, for example) and thus the risks linked to the introduction of alien and invasive species potentially harmful to ecosystems”.
