Francesca Marucco

Università degli Studi di Torino | UNITO · Dipartimento di Scienze della Vita e Biologia dei Sistemi

Wolves have large spatial requirements and their expansion in Europe is occurring over national boundaries, hence the need to develop monitoring programs at the population level. Wolves in the Alps are defined as a functional population and management unit. The range of this wolf Alpine population now covers seven countries: Italy, France, Austria,...

Biodiversity and the science that addresses its conservation, loss, and recovery, including conservation biology and restoration ecology, are high on the contemporary global agenda. While the hospitality industry has taken major steps toward net carbon zero and even net positive business, we argue that it has another significant advance to make. Th...

The wolf (Canis lupus) is among the most controversial of wildlife species. Abundance estimates are required to inform public debate and policy decisions, but obtaining them at biologically relevant scales is challenging. We developed a system for comprehensive population estimation across the Italian Alpine Region (100,000 km2 ), involving 1,513 t...

Wolf populations are recovering and expanding across Europe, causing conflicts with livestock owners. Here we compiled incident-based livestock damage data across 21 countries for the years 2018, 2019 and 2020, during which 39,262 wolf-caused incidents were reported from 470 administrative regions. We found substantial regional variation in all asp...

Wolf populations are recovering and expanding across Europe, causing conflicts with livestock owners. To mitigate these conflicts and reduce livestock damages, authorities spend considerable resources to compensate damages, support damage prevention measures, and manage wolf populations. However, the effectiveness of these measures remains largely...

Despite the recent expansion of the Italian wolf population, a proper long-term conservation of the species is limited by a high administrative and management fragmentation at a national scale, and by a lack of solid information on its population. Monitoring is the basis of every conservation policy, and the absence of a homogeneous and simultaneou...

Wildlife dispersal directly influences population expansion patterns, and may have indirect effects on the spread of wildlife diseases. Despite its importance to conservation, little is known about dispersal for several species. Dispersal processes in expanding wolf (Canis lupus) populations in Europe is not well documented. Documenting the natural...

Ecological knowledge is considered an important factor in environmental policy-making. However, the opportunity for ecologists to influence policy can often occur within discrete time policy windows, and seizing these opportunities has been heavily emphasized as a recent global conservation need. In 2017 the Natura 2000 Conservation Measures have b...

Monitoring standards and strategy to optimise the integrated monitoring of the status of the wolf alpine population. On behalf of the LIFE WolfAlps project

The project Status and Conservation of the Alpine Lynx Population SCALP is an ongoing programme aiming to coordinate the Eurasian lynx Lynx lynx monitoring, conservation and management activities in the Alps, but the monitoring approach has recently been expanded to the neighbouring Dinaric and Jura Mountains. The long-term goal of the SCALP is to...

Sharing space with large carnivores on a human-dominated continent like Europe results in multiple conflictful interactions with human interests, of which depredation on livestock is the most widespread. We conducted an analysis of the impact by all four European large carnivores on sheep farming in 10 European countries, during the period 2010-201...

The promotion of sustainable tourism and outdoor sports can represent an important way to couple environmental conservation strategies and economic enhancement in marginal and Alpine areas. In this context catch and release fly fishing zones can represent an interesting tool, although no data is available on the effectiveness of these practices on...

Background: Wild carnivores such as the grey wolf (Canis lupus), red fox (Vulpes vulpes) and golden jackal (Canis aureus) are recognized hosts of Dirofilaria immitis. However, few studies have focused on their actual role in the epidemiology of heartworm infection. This study describes the prevalence and distribution of D. immitis in wolves in a h...

Dirofilaria immitis is the causative agent of heartworm disease, a worldwide distributed parasitosis of dogs. Other canids, such as fox (Vulpes vulpes) and jackal (Canis latrans), are deemed as accidental or marginal hosts, in which adults of D.immitis rarely produce circulating microfilariae. However, no studies define the epidemiological role of...

Free-ranging grey wolves ( Canis lupus ), which are presently recolonizing Italy, can be parasitized by a diversity of helminths, but have rarely been subject to studies of their parasites. Therefore, this study aims to determine the prevalence of gastrointestinal helminths of road-killed grey wolves from the Piedmont region of Italy. Forty-two wol...

Anthropogenic hybridization is widely perceived as a threat to the conservation of biodiversity. Nevertheless, to date, relevant policy and management interventions are unresolved and highly convoluted. While this is due to the inherent complexity of the issue, we hereby hypothesize that a lack of agreement concerning management goals and approache...

The Eurasian lynx is of special conservation concern based on the European Union's Habitat Directive and its populations need to be maintained or restored at favourable conservation status. To evaluate lynx population status, appropriate monitoring needs to be in place. We modelled the distribution dynamics of lynx in the Alps (200 000 km2) during...

Following protection measures implemented since the 1970s, large carnivores are currently increasing in number and returning to areas from which they were absent for decades or even centuries. Monitoring programmes for these species rely extensively on non‐invasive sampling and genotyping. However, attempts to connect results of such studies at lar...

p>Following protection measures implemented since the 1970s, large carnivores are currently increasing in number and returning to areas from which they were absent for decades or even centuries. Monitoring programmes for these species rely extensively on non-invasive sampling and genotyping. However, attempts to connect results of such studies at l...

Shape files of current and historical distribution maps of large carnivore species in Europe. Also available from http://datadryad.org/resource/doi:10.5061/dryad.986mp

The conservation of large carnivores is a formidable challenge for biodiversity conservation. Using a data set on the past and current status of brown bears (Ursus arctos), Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx), gray wolves (Canis lupus), and wolverines (Gulo gulo) in European countries, we show that roughly one-third of mainland Europe hosts at least one larg...

Large carnivores (bears Ursus arctos, wolves Canis lupus, lynx Lynx lynx and wolverines Gulo gulo) are among the most challenging group of species to maintain as large and continuous populations or to reintegrate back into the European landscape. Political, socioeconomic and society changes challenge past management approaches in some of the large...

Genetic capture–recapture (CR) analysis is a highly promising tool to estimate population parameters and monitor populations through time. However, its level of accuracy has rarely been assessed and comparisons with traditional estimates in controlled settings have rarely been performed. We used CR analysis with long-term fecal genotyping data and...

To assess the status of lynx we analysed lynx signs of presence within the range of the Italian Alps from 2005 to 2009. A total of 268 signs have been collected, compared to 411 signs during the previous pentad. The distribution of the confirmed signs of lynx presence is confined to three concise areas: the Northeastern Alps of Friuli VG, the Trent...

The natural return of the wolf (Canis lupus) in the western Alps of Italy and France at the beginning of the 1990's, after 70 years of absence, is an important ecological and social event. The Regione Piemonte, in the course of the Progetto Lupo Piemonte, intensively monitored the wolf population over the Piemonte territory from 1999 to 2010. We es...

Reliable estimates of population parameters and their trends are necessary for effective management and conservation actions, especially for endangered species such as wolves in most European countries. Under the Habitat Directive 92/43/CEE, all countries are required to monitor the status of their endangered populations. The ultimate goal of popul...

1. Wolves Canis lupus recently recolonized the Western Alps through dispersal from the Italian Apennines, representing one of several worldwide examples of large carnivores increasing in highly human-dominated landscapes. Understanding and predicting expansion of this population is important for conservation because of its direct impact on livestoc...

Reliable estimates of population parameters are necessary for effective management and conservation actions. The use of genetic data for capture–recapture (CR) analyses has become an important tool to estimate population parameters for elusive species. Strong emphasis has been placed on the genetic analysis of non-invasive samples, or on the CR ana...

1. Reliable estimates of population parameters are often necessary for conservation management but these are hard to obtain for elusive, rare and wide-ranging species such as wolves Canis lupus. This species has naturally recolonized parts of its former habitat in Western Europe; however, an accurate and cost-effective method to assess population t...

Spatial population dynamics of recolonizing wolves in the Western Alps

We assessed the accuracy of scat-sampling methods in relation to sources of bias (statistical independence of the data and definition of the sampling unit) and precision (sample size). We developed a method to quantify diets of predators accurately in a study of diet selection by wolves (Canis lupus) during 3 winter seasons (1999–2002) in the Weste...

Wolves in Italy strongly declined in the past and were confined south of the Alps since the turn of the last century, reduced in the 1970s to approximately 100 individuals surviving in two fragmented subpopulations in the central-southern Apennines. The Italian wolves are presently expanding in the Apennines, and started to recolonize the western A...

We used noninvasive methods to obtain genetic and demographic data on the wolf packs (Canis lupus), which are now recolonizing the Alps, a century after their eradication. DNA samples, extracted from presumed wolf scats collected in the western Italian Alps (Piemonte), were genotyped to determine species and sex by sequencing parts of the mitochond...