María Luisa Rodríguez-Tamayo

Selección de áreas prioritarias para la conservación de flora gipsícola en el sureste de la Península Ibérica

Recent studies have highlighted the gypsum outcrops of Almeria (southeast Spain) as the most outstanding for the conservation of Iberian gypsophilous flora. The need of preserving this natural heritage and the impossibility to protect all the outcrops present within the territory, led us to identify which areas should be considered as of priority for conservation. To this end, we establish as a priority that the proposed conservation network of sites should include all gypsophyte species at least once. Other possible conservation goals on which to base the area selection and the associated scenarios were also taken into account. We first elaborated a cartography for the gypsophytes based on 10 km sided-cells. Next, in order to rank the importance of each locality, several commonly employed conservation criteria (diversity, rarity of the flora, complementarity) were applied to the cartographic information, and the findings obtained by each procedure contrasted. The results showed that protecting the deposits found in three cells (Sorbas, already protected because of its geomorphological singularity, Venta de los Yesos and Topares) would allow the representation of each species at least once and to achieve several complementary conservation targets. The findings are discussed within the context of the social and administrative peculiarities of the area.

Can gypsophytes distinguish different types of gypsum habitats

Abstract From an ecological point of view, gypsum outcrops and their corresponding vegetation are not yet fully understood. Most of the studies have concentrated on merely describing these plant communities. However, some researchers have tried to differentiate between these scrublands not only in terms of their geographical location, but also in terms of their ecological behaviour. Our botanical, edaphic and ecophysiological study, which adopts this last approach, makes use of chlorophyll fluorescence to distinguish the small—sized and sparse scrublands growing on gypsum barrens from the very different shrublike Ononis tridentata communities in the gypsum outcrop of the karst in Sorbas (Almería, Spain). In the three gypsophytes used to measure chlorophyll fluorescence values (Gypsophila struthium, Helianthemum squamatum and Teucrium turredanum), the records reveal that the environment has an impact on the Fv/Fm minimum values, however different the reaction of the species may be.