Reconstructing “Plant Community Scenarios” by means of palaeocarpological data from the CENOFITA database, with an example from the Ca’ Viettone site (Pliocene, Northern Italy).

CENOFITA 1.2 is a database containing published and unpublished information about 70 late Cenozoic Italian sites with plant macrofossils (taxonomy, stratigraphy, geography, qualitative and quantitative carpological data, plant ecology and habitus, literature citations). It provides a supporting tool for an easy retrieval of palaeofloristic data, also accessible to non-specialist users, which are useful to study Italian phytodiversity of the last 6 Myr and to contribute in reconstructing palaeovegetation and palaeoenvironment. As an example, this paper presents a first attempt towards the definition of a standardized reconstruction of selected aspects of late Cenozoic plant communities on the basis of data (mainly concerning fruits and seeds) extracted from CENOFITA 1.2, which regard the Pliocene Ca’ Viettone site. We obtained five alternative ‘‘Plant Community Scenarios’’ (PCSs), each one containing fifty sketchy ‘‘plant symbols,’’ which represent several categories of ‘‘growth forms’’ (e.g.: evergreen tree, deciduous shrub, etc.). The number of ‘‘plant symbols’’ of each type in a PCS has been determined on the basis of percent abundance (X), in sediment samples, of plant macrofossils referred to a definite category of ‘‘growth form.’’ We also introduced tentative corrections for taphonomical biases induced by different size and production rate of plant parts. Thanks to data integration from a wide sedimentation area, PCSs based on several, roughly contemporaneous, plant assemblages have been considered definitely more accurate representations of the ancient mesic plant communities than those based on a single plant assemblage. This type of PCS suggests, in agreement with former reconstructions, that the generalized mesic plant community of the Ca’ Viettone site would be a forest vegetation, highly diverse, and dominated by evergreen angiosperms and conifers.