Abstract
Several important
habitats have become threatened in the last few centuries in the Mediterranean
Basin due to major changes adopted in land‐use practices. The consequent loss of natural and seminatural orchid
habitats leads to the appreciation of small anthropogenic habitats, such as
cemeteries and roadside verges. Colonization of cemeteries and roadside verges
by orchids has long been known, but no study to date compared the suitability
of these two anthropogenic habitats for orchids. Therefore, in this paper our
aim was to survey cemeteries and roadside verges and to compare these two
habitats regarding their role in conserving Mediterranean terrestrial orchids.
We conducted field surveys in three Mediterranean islands, Cyprus, Crete, and
Lesbos, where both cemeteries and roadside verges were sampled on a
geographically representative scale. We found a total of almost 7,000 orchid
individuals, belonging to 77 species in the two anthropogenic habitat types.
Roadside verges hosted significantly more individuals than cemeteries in Crete
and Lesbos, and significantly more species across all three islands. Our
results suggest that although cemeteries have a great potential conservation
value in other parts of the world, intensive maintenance practices that
characterized cemeteries in these three islands renders them unable to sustain
valuable plant communities. On the other hand, roadside verges play a prominent
role in the conservation of Mediterranean orchids in Cyprus and Greece. The pioneer
status of roadside verges facilitates their fast colonization, while roads
serve as ecological corridors in fragmented landscapes.
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