Flowering phenology of antrhopogenous plant communities in an urban ecosystem: a useful tool for ecological evaluation and aerobiological monitoring

This thesis deals with the anthropogenous plant communities in the urban ecosystem of Rome. These communities are of paramount importance for their high species-richness and because in the urban tissue of Rome there is a large percentage of abandoned open spaces settled by these communities. The question addressed in this work is: how the phenology of anthropogenous plan communities responds to the environmental factors of urban ecosystems? In particular, is there a relationship with temperature and percentage of impervious surfaces? The word “communities” is underscored, since this study is based on a comparison among sites, and should not be confused with the alternative (more widespread) approach of comparing species in different sites. The sites were selected in order to represent different combination of environmental factors, and the observations are as close as possible to a factorial experiment. As close as possible, since not all combinations of factors occur in the field and therefore a truly factorial experiment is unobtainable without manipulation – a common problem with observational studies which we tried to overcome in the statistical analysis by exploiting the powerful method of NGM.