Poldini, Livio

Born in Trieste (Italy) on 7 September, 1930.
Doctor in Natural Sciences in 1949 (University of Padova).
Associated botanical curator at the Natural History Museum of Trieste (1958- 1960).
Extraordinary assistant of Pharmacological Botany (from1961) Specialization in phytosociology at the Station Internationale de Geobotanique Méditerranéenne et Alpine de Montepellier with the guide of prof. J. Braun- Blanquet (1961-62).
Free professor of Phytosociology and assistant professor in 1968 Extraordinary professor at the University di Trieste (form 1976). Full professor of Plant Ecology at the University of Trieste (from 1979). Professor emeritus at the University of Trieste from 2003.

Research activities
His research work is concerned mainly with floristic, phytogeographic, phytosociologic and phytochemical studies, with vegetation mapping and naturalistic land assessment.
In the seventies he participated to the definition of the Regional Urbanistic Plane with the aim of defining the perimeters of natural parks and reserves in Friuli Venezia Giulia.
Among his numerous papers (more than 300 papers), there are a monograph on the vegetation of the north-Adriatic Karst and two chorological atlases of the flora of Friuli Venezia Giulia and of the book of plant diversity of the Karst between Trieste and Gorizia in order to evaluate the state of the environment. He has participated to the redaction of sylvicultural typologies both of Veneto and Friuli Venezia Giulia.

From 1994 to 1996 he was the scientific responsible for the project "Natura 2000 - Bioitaly" for the region Friuli Venezia Giulia, with the aim of creating a catalogue of the areas with prominent naturalistic value.

He was scientific responsible of a project of vegetation restoration along pipelines in the Karst environment and of a project of restoration of dry grasslands in the Karst area.

He was local responsible of a national MURST Project on "Biodiversity and processes of vegetation restoration of marginal areas", focusing on the reconstruction of mantels and bush encroachment in different altitudinal belt (from plain to mountain) and on its relationships with the climatic-edaphic factors. He was the scientific responsible for the project "Causal analysis of the north¬eastern Italian vegetation", where the main aim is to systematically analyse the vegetation cover of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, in order to produce a complete monograph on the regional vegetation.

He has collaborated to the "Project for the coastal and marine conservation in Friuli-Venezia Giulia".

He has compiled the Check-list of the Flora of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, in order to define the correct nomenclature and to produce a catalogue of synonyms.

He has coordinated a working group to produce a handbook of Friuli Venezia Giulia habitats and a methodology for evaluating the environmental quality. He has worked nationally for the publication of a checklist of the flora of Italy and a book of the series of vegetation in Italy (scale 1:250.000). He has collaborated on the project "A survey of the non-native Italian flora", an overview of the distribution and invasive status of non-native species in the Italian flora across its administrative regions, biogeographic regions and main land use types, and a synthesis of current knowledge on the threats they pose within the country. A further work has taken into account some behaviors and strategies (flowering, pollination, dispersal, duration in the seed-bank, Grime functional strategies, and habitats) and correlations with reference to the extinction, decline and spread of the archaeophytes. It has also developed an indirect method to measure plant species invasion using historical and current data from various sources is described. This method involves a diachronic approach whereby the speed of plant invasion can be measured as the rate of new site colonization by species over time.
The last works concern the correlation among biodiversity, biomass and other plant community parameters using the phytosociological approach, the riparian Salix alba-scrubs of the Po lowland (N-ltaly) from a European perspective and the syntaxonomy of the Italian black alder swamps within the European context.

Honours
He is correspondent member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences, Lectern and Arts of Ljubljana.
He is part of the editorial board of Flora Mediterránea, Gortania, Plant Biosystems, Hacquetia, Fitosociologia.
He is regional adviser for Hegi "Illustrierte Flora von Mitteleuropa" and for "Atlas Flora Europaea".

(October 2011)