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Introduction
Education
October 2017 - October 2019
September 2014 - October 2017
Publications
Publications (27)
Caves are quite stable environments where organisms are usually described as lacking biological cycles. However, recent evidence is emerging on the rhythmicity of cave-dwelling animals, with experimental, observational and genetic analyses. There are still many uncertainties, as some organisms may have regular or irregular rhythms, and some others...
Climate change is causing European temperate climates to shift toward mediterranean conditions, a phenomenon called ‘mediterranization’. Mediterranization is altering biological communities, facilitating expansion of species pre-adapted to mediterranean habitats. Colonization by novel species can drastically affect local biodiversity, particularly...
Monitoring programs are pivotal to establishing sound management. Due to economic, logistic, and time limitations, monitoring programs often overlook differences among life‐history stages. However, species occurrence does not necessarily mean population viability, and it is unclear to what extent monitoring programs that do not consider separately...
Documenting population trends is pivotal to identify the underlying drivers of biodiversity changes and setting conservation priorities. Ascertaining trends often requires long-term, standardized, monitoring data that are not always available. Historical data provide important information on past species distribution, but their integration with rec...
Detecting the trends of species and populations is fundamental to identifying taxa with high conservation priority. Unfortunately, long-term monitoring programs are challenging and often lacking. The Italian agile frog Rana latastei is endemic to Northern Italy and adjacent countries, is considered vulnerable by the IUCN, and is protected at the Eu...
Documenting amphibian declines and extinctions is pivotal to identify drivers and conservation priorities. However, ascertaining population trends is difficult, and requires long term monitoring programs. Unfortunately, such programs often are jeopardized by funding constraints and rarely cover broad areas of species ranges. The cave salamander, Sp...
Detecting the trends of species and populations is fundamental to identify taxa with high conservation priority. Unfortunately, long-term monitoring programs are challenging and often lacking. The Italian agile frog Rana latastei is endemic to Northern Italy and adjacent countries, is considered vulnerable by the IUCN, and is protected at the Europ...
Aim
The identification of biogeographical zones has been fundamental in broadscale biodiversity analyses over the last 150 years. If processes underlying bioregionalization, such as climatic differences, tectonics and physical barriers, are consistent across vertebrate clades, we expect that groups with more similar ecological characteristics would...
Species distribution models are often used to predict the potential distributions of invasive species outside their native ranges and rely on the assumption of realized niche conservatism. Analyses observed that freshwater invasive species often show high degrees of niche expansion, suggesting limited reliability of species distribution models. How...
The evolution of sexual dimorphism (SD) is driven by intricate interplays between sexual and natural selection. When it comes to SD variation within populations, however, environmental factors play a major role. Sexually selected traits are expected to be strongly dependent on individual body condition, which is influenced by the local environment...
Most animal species are detected imperfectly and overlooking individuals can result in a biased inference of the abundance patterns and underlying processes. Several techniques can incorporate the imperfect detection process for a more accurate estimation of abundance, but most of them require repeated surveys, i.e., more sampling effort compared t...
The cover image is based on the Original Article Explaining declines of newt abundance in northern Italy, by Mattia Falaschi et al.
Cover Image: Italian crested newt (Triturus carnifex) from northern Italy.
Photo Credit: Matteo Riccardo Di Nicola.
Amphibians are an exemplary case of the current biodiversity crisis, being among the vertebrates suffering the fastest decline. Population dynamics of amphibians can result from processes acting at different scales. Both the local characteristics of breeding wetlands and the features of the surrounding landscape can strongly affect the temporal dyn...
Aim
Analyses of biogeographical patterns and macroecology of islands require large datasets reporting the occurrence of species. The Mediterranean region is a biodiversity hotspot, which hosts a large number of reptile species and has been the focus of many studies. Nevertheless, comprehensive inventories describing the features and biodiversity of...
Aim
Understanding which factors determine the variation in population size across space and time is crucial to plan sound conservation interventions. Amphibians are often characterized by large demographic changes, therefore a better understanding of factors driving these changes could help mitigate their global crisis. We investigated drivers of a...
Cover: Italian tree frog (Hyla intermedia). When multiple threats act on spatially structured populations, a comparison of the factors determining extirpations and colonizations is vital to conservation planning because these populations require habitat connectivity. In the spatially structured populations of amphibians in Lombardy, including the I...
Changes in human activities caused by the COVID-19 pandemic can have multiple effects on biodiversity but there is limited knowledge of how this can impact invasive alien species (IAS). Societal measures against the spread of COVID-19 can have both short-term and long-term consequences on IAS. In the short-term, reduced human disturbance on natural...
Many organisms live in networks of local populations connected by dispersing individuals, called spatially structured populations (SSPs), where the long‐term persistence of the entire network is determined by the balance between 2 processes acting at the scale of local populations: extinction and colonization. When multiple threats act on an SSP, a...
Lethocerus patruelis (Stål, 1854) is the only European member of the Belostomatidae family. During the last decades Lethocerus patruelis
records have become frequent in south-eastern Italy, probably due to multiple accidental introductions or a natural westward spread of its range.
The first records of Lethocerus cfr. patruelis for the Calabria r...
Findings of Lethocerus patruelis (Stål, 1855) in Southern Italy have become frequent in the last decades. We collected records of Lethocerus patruelis observations in Italy using scientific literature, citizen science programs, and social networks as data sources to create a complete and up-to-date dataset. This dataset is made of 59 Lethocerus pat...
The presence of the red swamp crayfish Procambarus clarkii in Italy is documented since 1989, but no comprehensive data are available on its spread through time at the national scale. New confirmed records for Procambarus clarkii are continuously arising in recent years across the country. By reviewing the scientific and grey literature, we obtaine...
This is the first known record of a male of Lethocerus patruelis (Stål, 1855), a predator giant water-bug, in Italy and the first record in the Basilicata Region, in Southern Italy. The specimen was found in 2015 in Calciano (Matera Province), a small village in a local protected natural area. The possible occurrence of stable populations of the sp...
Gli anfibi sono un taxon gravemente minacciato e in forte declino a livello mondiale.
Tra i fattori che determinano la crisi degli anfibi vi sono la perdita e la frammentazione di habitat e
l’introduzione di specie alloctone invasive. Per valutare quali siano le conseguenze a lungo termine di specie alloctone e alterazioni degli habitat è necessari...
Accurate measures of species abundance are essential to identify conservation strategies. N-mixture models are increasingly used to estimate abundance on the basis of species counts. In this study we tested whether abundance estimates obtained using N-mixture models provide consistent results with more traditional approaches requiring capture (capt...