Cabo Verde’s flora as source of gene resilience to climate changes and relevant bioactive compounds: A genomic and chemical approach

Located 570 km west of Dakar, Senegal, Cabo Verde is an African archipelago made of ten volcanic islands, nine of them inhabited, one uninhabited, and various islets. Cabo Verde, described in the first chapter of this thesis, is part of the Macaronesia islands, which are one of the most important ecoregions in the world regarding biodiversity, for its paleo and neoendemisms.
The long biogeographic isolation of the archipelago has led to a unique evolution of taxa and associations of flora, as local species gradually adapted to climatic and geological conditions, and the further fragmentation of the territory into different islands, with different characteristics and sizes, amplified the effect of biogeographic isolation. Cabo Verde’s flora is thus characterized by low richness in terms of the total number of species, but a high number of endemic taxa. Cabo Verde is extremely vulnerable to climate change and exposed to increasingly extreme weather events, namely, desertification of land and persistent droughts, occasional but severe and highly damaging heavy rains. Seventy eight percent of Cabo Verde's endemic flora is threatened (...)