Effects of anthropogenic landforms on Potential Natural Vegetation in a wide urban ecosystem (Capital city of Rome, Italy)

Ongoing urbanization trends are expected to affect sustainability and resilience of urban ecosystems in terms of biodiversity, ecosystem services, and human well-being worldwide. As the European Nature Restoration Regulation (1991/2024) emphasises, green urban ar eas are crucial for facing these issues. In historical cities however, unsealed surfaces may even have been changed in land morphology, leading to shifts in biodiversity support ca pacity and Potential Natural Vegetation (PNV). Understanding these alterations is vital for planning effective restoration actions, resilient Nature-Based Solutions, and self-sustaining ecosystems, also in line with increasingly numerous urban afforestation plans. In the case study of Rome (Italy), anthropogenic landforms have been characterised through morpho metric analysesthatallowedvolumesofanthropogenicdepositstobequantified, intercepted lithologies to be recognised, and soil and drainage changes to be estimated. Therefore, vegetation surveys have been conducted for investigating intensity and direction of even tual shifts in spontaneous dynamics. On the one hand, through node-importance analy ses, forests under more natural conditions and low anthropogenic disturbance were selected and surveyed for defining reference PNV systems. On the other hand, vegetation surveys were performed in artificial contexts, both inside (altered) and outside (control plot) an thropogenic landforms, to assess the shifts from low-disturbed successional models due to geomorphological alteration and/or additional effects of urbanization (e.g. edge effect and isolation of residual forest patches). In conclusion, anthropogenic landform forests di vert from natural ones in terms of specific composition being characterised by invasive, nitrophilous, and transitional species. These aspects should be considered when taking ac tion for sustainable urban forestry.