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40 SALVATORE PASTA ET ALII
Martino & Trapani, 1967; Gianguzzi et al., 2006;
Romano et al., 2006). Some rough information on
the vegetation and the fauna of the islets is given, too.
Basic information on the study area
All the studied islets are characterized by Juras-
sic or Cretaceous calcareous rocks, although some
spots of outcropping marls and radiolarites have
been recorded on PRE (Abate et al., 1997). The
available information on the rainfall and tempera-
ture regimes of the nearest climate recording sta-
tion, i.e. Trapani (Zampino et al., 1997) suggests
that the islets are all subject to the same bioclimatic
type, which is upper thermo-mediterranean dry ac-
cording to Rivas-Martínez (2008) classification.
During Last Glacial Maximum (i.e. c. 18-12 Kyrs
BP), the sea level was some 80-120 m lower than
today (Lambeck et al., 2010), so that all the consid-
ered islets were part of the main islands, and they
must have been connected with them at least till 8
Kyrs BP (Agnesi et al., 1993; Antonioli et al., 2002).
Malatesta (1957) noticed plenty of lithic arti-
facts on PRE. No other information seems to be
available on the past land use and human presence
on the islets. Besides, a lot of potsherds have been
observed on the flat inland of PRE, which also hosts
a little and rough cubic structure, probably built up
some decades ago by shepherds, who used to trans-
fer on PRE their animals during summer, in order
to have a shady and fresh place where to eat and
rest. Moreover, along the eastern border of FLE a
sort of path was noticed, perhaps produced by in-
tense trampling due to the presence of herbivores
left on the islet during summer season. The main
geographical characteristics of the islets are sum-
marized in Table 1.
Code Per (m) Surface (ha) Dist (m)
PREV 1,240 4.319 224
GAL 453 0.706 420
ROT 305 0.423 1 4
FLE 489 0.959 46
Table 1. Main geographic features of the investigates islets. Per: perimeter; Dist: minimum distance from the
main island; ME: maximum elevation above sea level.
MATERIAL AND METHODS
A specimen of Parapholis pycnantha (Hack.)
C.E. Hubb. (Poaceae), quoted by Cuccuini (2002),
testifies that Giovanni Gussone, the indefatigable
botanist who explored every hidden spot of Sicily
and wrote down the most detailed checklist of Si-
cilian vascular flora ever published, visited FLE
during his botanical expedition to Egadi islands
during May 1829 (Pasquale, 1876; Trotter, 1948).
The only recent data on FLE flora and vegetation
were collected by S. Pasta during a short visit some
twenty years ago (April 1995; hereinafter indicated
as SP0). More recently the investigation on the vas-
cular flora of the four islets was carried out through
five visits between 2004 and 2010. More in detail,
three of them were carried out by S. Pasta and L.
Scuderi (PRE: SP-LS1, 21/09/2004; PRE and GAL:
SP-LS2, 14/08/2005; FLE: SP-LS3, 27/09/2005),
while A. and J. Sciberras first visited PRE and GAL
(A-JS1, 10/10/2010) and then ROT (A-JS2,
17/10/2010).
The classification of the observed plants was
carried out mainly using Pignatti (1982) and Tutin
et al. (1964-1980, 1993), while their nomenclature
is mainly based on Euro+Med (2006). Moreover,
the families are circumscribed according to the
most recent proposals of Angiosperm Phylogeny
Group (APG, 2009; Reveal & Chase, 2011), while
families, genera and infrageneric taxa are listed in
alphabetical order.
The check-list also provides basic information
on life forms (Raunkiær, 1934) and chorotypes (ac-
cording to Pasta, 1997b) or xenophyte status
(Richardson et al., 2000). In order to perform a bet-
ter interpretation of the floristic similarity among
the islets, the niche width of each taxon was taken
ME (m) UTM coordinates
8 E 262835.73 - N 4199765.67
2 E 262512.94 - N 4199493.17
E 260929.07 - N 4200840.57
20 E 265383.93 - N 4207687.67