RESEARCH ARTICLE Solanum torvum Sw. (Solanaceae): a new alien species for Europe Carmelo Maria Musarella Received: 29 April 2019 / Accepted: 9 August 2019 Ó Springer Nature B.V. 2019 Abstract The largest family of Solanaceae counts many species widespread worldwide, either wild and cultivated. A lot of cultivated species of this family represent an important part of the world of food. These and other spontaneous plants have several ethnob- otanical uses. In this paper, the author reports for the first time about the presence, as casual alien species, of Solanum torvum Sw. in Europe (Calabria region, Southern Italy). Actually, it was reported in Italy by mistake until then. This species is native of West Indies and naturalized in several tropical and subtrop- ical regions worldwide. S. torvum, also used as rootstock for cultivated Solanaceae, can escape and invade natural habitats, replacing the natural vegeta- tion and creating changes in relationships with other species. Twenty-three plants of S. torvum are located in a stream, living together with other alien and synanthropic species. This work deals with its geo- graphical distribution and new location, with its morphological, ecological and taxonomic character- istics. S. torvum, can be considered in Italy and in Europe as an alien casual species, but further field investigations on this species are necessary to avoid its diffusion. Keywords Alien plant Á Calabria Á Invasive species Á Solanum torvum Á Southern Italy Á Xenophytes Introduction Solanum L. (Solanaceae) is an important genus of angiosperms that records approximately 1200 species distributed worldwide (Knapp 2019). Humans select important agricultural food species of common use around the world from wild types belonging to this genus, such as: S. tuberosum L. (potato), S. lycoper- sicum L. (tomato), S. melongena L. subsp. melongena (eggplant), S. aethiopicum L. (bitter tomato), S. muri- catum Aiton (pepino), and so on (Hammer and Laghetti 2006). Other species, used for decorative purposes only, are alien plants in southern Italy when they escape from cultivation (Stinca et al. 2012, 2016a, 2017). Europe hosts overall sixty-two species belonging to the genus Solanum (Valde ´s 2012), while in Italy there are twenty- three in total, out of those twenty are alien (Galasso et al. 2018) and three are native (Bartolucci et al. 2018). We can found in Italy other invasive species belonging to this family (Salerno and Stinca 2017). Calabria is the most southern region of the Italian Peninsula. Recently it was studied from different points of view in order to increase the lack of botanical C. M. Musarella (&) Department of Agraria, Mediterranean University of Reggio Calabria, Reggio Calabria, Italy e-mail: carmelo.musarella@unirc.it C. M. Musarella Department of Animal and Plant Biology and Ecology, Section of Botany, University of Jae ´n, Campus Universitario Las Lagunillas s/n, 23071 Jae ´n, Spain 123 Genet Resour Crop Evol https://doi.org/10.1007/s10722-019-00822-5