Francesca Brivio

• PhD
• PostDoc Position at University of Sassari

Recurring events like migrations are an important part of the biological cycles of species. Understanding the factors influencing the timing of such events is crucial for determining how species face the pervasive consequences of climate change in highly seasonal environments. Relying on data from 406 GPS‐collared Alpine ibex Capra ibex monitored a...

Animal populations are under mounting stress from the dual threats of climate change and rapid global human population growth, raising significant concerns about declining wildlife and the rising risk of zoonotic diseases. In many species, social interactions can be a highly plastic suite of behaviours that are responsive to these disturbances and...

Wildlife tagging provides critical insights into animal movement ecology, physiology, and behavior amid global ecosystem changes. However, the stress induced by capture, handling, and tagging can impact post-release locomotion and activity and, consequently, the interpretation of study results. Here, we analyze post-tagging effects on 1585 individu...

Flexibility in activity timing may enable organisms to quickly adapt to environmental changes. Under global warming, diurnally adapted endotherms may achieve a better energy balance by shifting their activity towards cooler nocturnal hours. However, this shift may expose animals to new or increased environmental challenges (e.g. increased predation...

Human‐dominated environments are growing worldwide, forcing animals to adapt to new conditions characterized by increased risks and/or anthropogenic resources availability. While numerous studies have compared behavioural patterns of rural and urban populations, little is known about plastic behavioural responses to temporal variations in human pre...

Predation by large predators on livestock is one of the main concerns in species conservation as it elicits prompt and effective retaliations. Therefore, conflict mitigation is essential to ensure long-term coexistence of predators with humans. We performed aversive conditioning (AC) with rubber bullets on one collared wolf that had become particul...

The goal of this report is modelling the occurrence for carnivores at the European scale and to compare the output of occurrence with observed hunting yield (HY) density models for red fox (Vulpes vulpes) and badger (Meles meles). Random Forest function was used for modelling occurrence of species. Occurrences available from the past 30 years (1990...

The International Symposium on Wild Boar and Other Suids (IWBS 2022), which took place in Montseny Biosphere Reserve (Catalonia, Spain) in September 2022, provided to ENETWILD with the opportunity to meet in‐person for the first time after 2.5 years, and meet the international scientific community with expertise on wild suids and other ungulates. T...

Behavioural syndromes theory predicts animals will exhibit sets of correlated risk-taking behaviours, with individuals displaying a constant willingness to take risks across different situations. Because this phenomenon has mostly been investigated under artificial experimental conditions, we aimed to establish whether wild animals spontaneously ex...

The goal of this report is i) to model the occurrence and hunting yield (HY) density of wild ungulates not only for widely distributed species in Europe, but also for those ones which have a constrained distribution and ii) to compare the output of occurrence with observed HY. Random Forest function was used for modelling occurrence of species. We...

The conflict between free-ranging livestock and wildlife is a serious conservation concern across rural communities worldwide. Livestock may affect wild herbivores via direct competition for resources due to spatial and diet overlap or via behavioural interference. It is imperative that we disentangle the effects of livestock on wildlife behaviour...

Despite its recognized importance for understanding the evolution of animal sociality as well as for conservation, long term analysis of social networks of animal populations is still relatively uncommon. We investigated social network dynamics in males of a gregarious mountain ungulate (Alpine ibex, Capra ibex) over ten years focusing on groups, s...

Animal weapons are one of the most studied morphological traits, particularly in Artiodactyla. Since in polygynous species males with larger weapons tend to be more successful in gaining access to females, researchers have traditionally focused on horn size. However, in species with limited horn size, weapon size has been assumed to have a reduced...

2 The chamois Rupicapra spp. is the most abundant mountain ungulate of Europe and the Near East, where it occurs as two species , the northern chamois R. rupicapra and the southern chamois R. pyrenaica. Here, we provide a state-of-the-art overview of research trends and the most challenging issues in chamois research and conservation, focusing on t...

The chamois Rupicapra spp. is the most abundant mountain ungulate of Europe and the Near East, where it occurs as two species, the northern chamois R. rupicapra and the southern chamois R. pyrenaica. Here, we provide a state‐of‐the‐art overview of research trends and the most challenging issues in chamois research and conservation, focusing on taxo...

Settlements are usually shared at different times by semi-fossorial mammals. Porcupine reproductive pair shows high den-site fidelity, but no data are available on the spatio-temporal inhabitation of settlements. In this investigation, the spatio-temporal inhabitation of settlements by crested porcupine families was investigated using camera-trappi...

In a previous report, ENETWILD proposed a generic model framework to predict habitat suitability and likely occurrence for wild ruminant species using opportunistic presence data (occurrence records for wild ungulate species from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility). In this report, for the first time, we develop models based on hunting yi...

The ENETWILD consortium (www.enetwild.com) aims at progressively defining the spatial interface between wild ungulates and livestock in Europe, which is essential to evaluate the risk for shared diseases. This is to provide preliminary risk maps of possible wild‐domestic interfaces at European scale using relatively similar sized regions by compili...

An increase of nocturnal activity of ungulate species may represent a compensatory opportunity for energy intake, when activity in daylight is hindered by some disturbance events (e.g. hunting or predation). Therefore, mostly-diurnal and crepus-cular species may be active in bright moonlight nights whereas others may shift their diurnal activity to...

In the previous ENETWILD model, the predicted patterns of wild boar abundance based on hunting yield data reached an acceptable reliability when the model was downscaled to higher spatial resolution. This new approach, based on the modelling of hunting yield densities instead of hunting yield counts and the assessment of spatial autocorrelation, wa...

Over the past few years, research on remote monitoring of animal behaviour by means of accelerometers integrated in GPS collars considerably increased. Use of accelerometers allows for long-term fine-scale behavioural measurements, which are extremely useful to study activity patterns. As the values generated by accelerometers are strongly affected...

Organisms differ in the strategy adopted to fuel reproduction by using resources either previously acquired and stored in body reserves (capital breeding) or, conversely, acquired during their reproductive activity (income breeding). The choice of one or the other strategy is related to several internal and external factors which are counteractive...

In order to define the spatial interface between wild boar and domestic pigs in Europe, the ENETWILD consortium (www.enetwild.com) described in a preliminary report the different sources of data for domestic pigs at European scale, and developed a preliminary risk map of possible spatial interaction between both groups. This model explored and asse...

ENETWILD consortium has developed methodologies for modelling wild boar abundance distribution based on hunting yield (HY) data. Although the methodologies reached an acceptable reliability, when models were downscaled to higher spatial resolution the predictions of absolute numbers of hunted animals tended to overprediction. Some important issues...

Interspecific interactions are key drivers in structuring animal communities. Sympatric animals may show such behavioural patterns as the differential use of space and/or time to avoid competitive encounters. We took advantage of the ecological conditions of our study area, inhabited by different ungulate species, to investigate the spatial and tem...

The general aim of this guidance is to review the methods for estimating relative abundance and density in wild ruminant species and give insights on how to obtain reliable estimations by using those methods. The results are a possible guideline on best practices to improve the accuracy and comparability of density methods. For these purposes, we r...

The ENETWILD consortium updated in August 2019 suitability maps of wild boar occurrence and relative abundance based on hunting statistics, providing predictions at 10x10 km. External validation of this relative abundance model and a new downscaling on a 2x2 km grid was addressed in the ENETWILD report in January 2020. In this report, we update and...

Protected areas are often blamed for offering refuge to pest species populations, giving rise to the so-called “reserve effect”. Nevertheless, this major conservation side effect has seldom been investigated or verified on a local scale. Along the borders of two protected areas of different size, we modelled wild boar individual likelihood of being...

The ENETWILD consortium provided in August 2019 a map at 10x10 km resolution for wild boar abundance based on hunting data. The availability of prediction maps at a spatial resolution comparable with the one of the home range of wild boar can be useful for further evaluation of risk of spread of African swine fever (ASF). Therefore, predictions of...

The ENETWILD consortium implementedtheEFSA‐funded project “Wildlife: collecting and sharing data on wildlife populations, transmitting animal diseases agents”, whose main objective is to collect wild boardensity, hunting and occurrence dataand model species geographical distribution and abundance throughout Europe.This subject is of particular conc...

Hunting statistics can be suitable to determine wild boar density estimates if a calibration with an accepted rigorous method is performed. Here, densities calculated from drive counts during collective drive hunting activities are compared against density values calculated by camera trapping using the random encounter method. For this purpose, we...

In October 2018 the ENETWILD consortium created suitability maps based on available data on wild boar occurrence at 10 km square resolution and initial version of abundance models based on hunting statistics at NUTS3 and NUTS2 resolution, that were statistically downscaled for MSs to 10x10 km grid squares. This report presents updated suitability m...

In 2007, the current outbreak of African swine fever (ASF), which severely affects wild boar populations and pigs, reached the Caucasus region. Since then, the virus has spread into eastern Europe and some places in central and western Europe (such as Belgium) through wild boar, domestic pigs, and human activities. The virus has raised serious conc...

Predators may influence their prey populations not only through direct lethal effects, but also by causing behavioural changes. The natural expansion of the wolf (Canis lupus) into the Alps provided the rare opportunity to monitor the responses of a prey species to the return of a large predator. Density effects have rarely been considered in the s...

Avoiding hyperthermia entails considerable metabolic costs for endotherms. Such costs increase in warm conditions, when endotherms may trade food intake for cooler areas to avoid heat stress and maximize their energy balance. The need to reduce heat stress may involve the adoption of tactics affecting space use and foraging behaviour, which are imp...

Although the proliferation of the wild boar in Europe makes capturing and handling necessary for both management and research, the behavioural responses of this species to capture are still unknown. We evaluated how capture affects wild boar behaviour during the first 30 days after the release, focusing on the animals’ total activity, mobility and...

The Dinaric region is the natural habitat of the Alpine chamois (Rupicapra rupicapra rupicapra) and Balkan chamois (Rupicapra rupicapra balcanica). Recently confirmed, these two subspecies hybridize in the contact zone on Mts. Velebit, coastal Croatia. Patterns of horn development in chamois can differ within populations and subspecies, and are mos...

Different species exhibit individual daily and annual activity patterns in response to a range of intrinsic and extrinsic drivers. Historically, research on the activity budgets of large wild animals focused on daylight hours due to the logistical difficulties of observing animals at night. Thanks to recent advances in animal-attached technology, h...

Noisy human activities such as helicopter traffic may affect physiology and behaviour of wild animals. Since chronic behavioural modifications can ultimately alter reproductive success and population dynamics, studying the response of different taxa and species to human-induced disturbance in different habitats is paramount. The present study analy...

The roe deer (Capreolus capreolus) is considered a special case of territorial ungulate. This study aimed to contribute to the knowledge of male roe deer territoriality by exploring its spatial use and activity patterns. We divided the territorial period (March–August) into three two-month sampling periods and found that the home range (HR) size of...

The range-shifts of many species are lagging behind climate change, meaning that those species are likely to experience increases in average ambient temperature. Heat-sensitive species may experience increasingly precarious trade-offs between investment in ther-moregulation versus other key processes as the climate warms. We investigated the potent...

Over the last century, the wild boar (Sus scrofa) has become an important wildlife species in both economic and ecological terms. Considered a pest by some and a resource by others, its rapid increase in population and distribution has raised management concerns. Studies on activity rhythms may provide useful insights into its overall ecology and h...

Activity rhythms play an important role in the ecological relations of a species and form part of its evolutionary adaptation. Such rhythms are strongly synchronised with the annual cyclic changes by environmental stimuli, the so-called zeitgebers. Animals’ reliance on environmental stimuli is highly species-specific and allows behavioural adjustme...

The importance of capturing wild animals for research and conservation projects is widely shared. As this activity continues to become more common, the need to assess its negative effects increases so as to ensure ethical standards and the validity of research results. Increasing evidence has revealed that indirect (physiological and behavioural) e...

Many studies comparing the behaviour of individ- uals of different genders or species showed that animal body mass and forage quality/quantity are key elements of the foraging ecology of herbivores. Since body mass could also influence the animal’s sensitivity to predation risk, its vigi- lance behaviour should consequently be affected. Alpine ibex...

In many ruminant species, males dramatically reduce forage intake during the rut. To date, different hypotheses have been suggested to explain this rut-induced hypophagia. To assess the predictions of the main hypotheses, we analysed Alpine ibex (Capra ibex) activity budget and compared the behaviour of males and females before, during, and after t...