Functional and Biological Diversity of Wild Edible Plants in Italy: Preliminary results from the FuD WE PIC Project

Wild edible plants (WEP) have been vital resources for humans since the Paleolithic, and they still play a key role today in the context of sustainability and food security. While most scientific literature has focused on the nutraceutical and ethnobotanical aspects of WEP, ecological studies utilizing big data to analyse WEP on broader scales are still lacking. In this study, we used the Italian WEP checklist AlimurgITA (1), including data from the most comprehensive ethnobotanical literature of Italy. We combined the AlimurgITA dataset with Italian vegetation plots from the European Vegetation Archive (2) to explore the relationships between WEP richness and habitat types. The preliminary results show that vegetated man-made habitats have highest values for both total WEP richness and WEP relative frequency, followed by grasslands and scrublands for total WEP richness, and by forests and scrublands for WEP relative frequency.