
Marcello D’AmicoDoñana Biological Station · Conservation Biology and Global Change
Marcello D’Amico
PhD
About
147
Publications
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Introduction
I am a conservation biologist studying the effects of global change by focusing on the relationship between infrastructure (roads, power lines, among others) and biodiversity.
Skills and Expertise
Additional affiliations
April 2018 - July 2019
July 2019 - April 2021
March 2016 - March 2018
Education
July 2009 - February 2015
October 2008 - October 2009
October 1998 - October 2008
Publications
Publications (147)
1. Barrier effect is a road-related impact affecting several animal populations. It can be caused by behavioural responses towards roads (surface and/or gap avoidance), associated emissions (traffic-emissions avoidance) and/or circulating vehicles (vehicle avoidance). Most studies so far have described road-effect zones along major roads, without d...
The European Journal of Wildlife Research introduces a new Topical Collection focused on Road Ecology. This Topical Collection aims to be a useful tool for the development of generalized principles and applications concerning wildlife-related aspects of Road Ecology. Submissions exploring new or lesser-known costs and potential benefits for wildlif...
Aim
Power lines can represent an important source of bird mortality through collision. The identification of more susceptible species, in terms of expected population‐level impacts, requires detailed biological and mortality information that is often difficult to obtain. Here, we propose a species prioritization method based on relatively easily ac...
Preocupa la prevista construcción de un tercer carril reversible en la principal carretera de Doñana, entre Almonte y el Rocío, con financiación europea. Ante los previsibles efectos negativos sobre la biodiversidad y los ecosistemas, entre ellos el atropello de fauna tan significativa como el lince ibérico, es imprescindible adoptar medidas de mit...
Metodología para el Estudio y Análisis de la Mortalidad de Vertebrados en Infraestructuras de
Transporte es el documento número 9 de la serie "Documentos para la reducción de la fragmentación
de hábitats causada por infraestructuras de transporte" que se elabora en el marco del grupo de
trabajo sobre esta temática. Este grupo integra representantes...
Supplementary material of: A framework for large-scale risk assessment of road-related impacts, with application to mustelids
Roads, while crucial for human development and economic growth, pose significant threats to biodiversity. Large-scale road risk assessments are essential for guiding infrastructure planning, particularly in identifying areas to avoid new construction or prioritizing regions for mitigation where road networks are already established. However, conduc...
This milestone report compiles mid-term findings from the six case studies of the NaturaConnect project, each serving as a critical testing ground to understand the practical implications of TEN-N across diverse environmental and socio-political contexts and different spatial scales. These mid-term reports represent a starting point for identifying...
Impacto de atropello en carnívoros ibéricos: las estimaciones del Proyecto SAFE
Roads provide attractive but dangerous habitats for a wide variety of wild animals, including granivorous species feeding on road-spilled grains. The survival of those animals would imply risk-taking behaviors toward vehicles. We investigated these behaviors in a southern Tunisian crested lark (Galerida cristata) population, by using the flight and...
Supplementary Information of the article: Risk-taking behavior in birds foraging along interurban roads
Un resumen de los datos de anfibios y reptiles recolectados durante el Proyecto SAFE
SAFE Project: developing a conceptual framework to roadkill surveys in order to estimate vertebrate mortality with citizen science at a country scale
Wildlife roadkill studies need to cope with a mismatch among recorded carcasses and actual road mortality, because of the existence of three biases: crippling, carcass‐persistence, and observer bias. Here, we focused on the often overlooked crippling bias, suggesting that it should be called carcass‐location bias and disentangling the related three...
Beyond crippling bias: Carcass‐location bias in roadkill studies (Appendix 1)
Beyond crippling bias: Carcass‐location bias in roadkill studies (Appendix 2)
Avances PT9, #ProyectoSAFE, Estudio piloto recopilación datos de atropellos, eBoletín GTFHT
Más de 8.500 atropellos de vertebrados han sido registrados hasta el momento por el Proyecto SAFE. Este trabajo conjunto entre el Ministerio de Medio Ambiente y varias entidades conservacionistas de relevancia entra en su recta final y los resultados permitirán tomar medidas para reducir una amenaza para la fauna salvaje poco atendida.
Linear infrastructure represent a barrier to movement for many species, reducing the connectivity of the landscapes in which they reside. Of all linear infrastructure, roads and fences are two of the most ubiquitous, and are understood to reduce landscape connectivity for wildlife. However, what is often neglected consideration is a holistic approa...
SAFE Project: an overview of preliminary results concerning mammal roadkills in Spain
The road to success and the fences to be crossed: Considering multiple infrastructure in landscape connectivity modelling (Dataset and script)
Human-induced fragmentation and habitat loss are major threats to biodiversity, operating at different spatial scales. Linear infrastructure such as roads can disrupt habitat connectivity, posing a serious threat to animal communities. In this study, we quantified the habitat connectivity and roadkill risk for the mammal community in the Friuli Ven...
Estimating roadkill impact by accounting for survey bias
The impact of road traffic on the reproductive success of a roadside-breeding bird: a case study on European bee-eaters in Doñana
List and amount of roadkilled species in our fieldwork survey
List of retained studies from the literature review, and related variables
Table showing the AIC model selection focusing on the countries of Mediterranean biome
Figure depicting the relation between the percentage of introduced species (both on the total of roadkilled species and on the total of existing species) and the latitude of the country hosting the study areas
Monitoring the presence and distribution of alien species is pivotal to assessing the risk of biological invasion. In our study, we carried out a worldwide review of roadkill data to investigate geographical patterns of biological invasions. We hypothesise that roadkill data from published literature can turn out to be a valuable resource for resea...
El Proyecto SAFE ha asumido el reto de hacer un diagnóstico completo de la mortalidad de la fauna en las carreteras españolas a través de prospecciones estandarizadas. Para mejorar la metodología, ha sido evaluada la eficacia de los muestreos para la búsqueda de animales atropellados, tanto en coche y bicicleta como a pie.
Las carreteras son unas de las infraestructuras lineales que están experimentando más expansión a nivel global, con evidentes efectos negativos sobre la biodiversidad. Su impacto más estudiado es la mortalidad por atropello, pero todavía sabemos poco de sus consecuencias sobre la dinámica de poblaciones animales. El primer paso en ese sentido debe...
Fragmentation and habitat loss caused by human activities are among the major threats to biodiversity, acting at different spatial and temporal scales. Linear infrastructures such as roads could interrupt habitat connectivity, thus representing a serious threat to the animal population. In this study, we quantified habitat connectivity and roadkill...
Investigating the spatial response of scavenging behaviors to roads may help in understanding the relevance of this overlooked ecosystem service. Roads can provide suitable foraging sites for scavengers, whether they are obligate or facultative. However, only a few studies have investigated the impact of roads on the spatial distribution of scaveng...
Roads are a direct threat to biodiversity and contribute to both fragmentation and degradation of landscapes. One of main consequences on biodiversity is wildlife mortality by roadkill. This mortality depends on the interaction between the presence/abundance of the affected species and both road-related and environmental characteristics.
Roads have multiple impacts on wildlife, but several species have been described to benefit from these infrastructures for different purposes, from movement to foraging. In some cases, roads can provide a limiting resource, determining then a population spreading along road proximities. However, these processes have been rarely described, and the p...
The network of roads is continuing to expand across the globe, and, as a result, is causing millions of wildlife fatalities. Wildlife-vehicle collisions can have an enormous impact on biodiversity. Therefore, providing an accurate assessment of the number of fatalities is essential for understanding the population impact-ing biased by a number of f...
Context
Understanding the factors determining the impacts of roads and how they fragment landscapes limiting the movement of animals, is key to implement efficient mitigation measures.
Aims
Here we investigate if road orientation in relation to limiting resources, a largely overlooked factor on road impact assessments, can influence the movement o...
Roadsides, in particular those being species-rich and of conservation value, are considered to improve landscape permeability by providing corridors among habitat patches and by facilitating species' dispersal. However, little is known about the potential connectivity offered by such high-value roadsides. Using circuit theory, we modelled connectiv...
As a response to the economic crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic, on July 2020 the European Council agreed on a massive recovery plan for the European Union denominated Next Generation EU. The first medium- and long-term purpose of such plan is guaranteeing a better future for next generations of European citizens. In this framework, there are sev...
Assessing the road effects on biodiversity is challenging because impacts may depend on both wildlife responses to roads and on the spatial arrangement of roads. We questioned whether an increase in road encroachment leads to significant changes in species occurrence and community composition. Using a large citizen-science dataset of point-counts p...
Roadsides can harbour remarkable biodiversity; thus, they are increasingly considered as habitats with potential for conservation value. To improve construction and management of roadside habitats with positive effects on biodiversity, we require a quantitative understanding of important influential factors that drive both positive and negative eff...
Approximately 65% of primate species are facing extinction, with threats including the impacts of linear infrastructures such as roads, railways, and power lines, associated with habitat loss and fragmentation, direct and indirect mortality, and changes in animal behavioral patterns. Nevertheless, this is an often-overlooked topic in primatology, a...
Assessing the road effects on biodiversity is challenging because impacts may depend on both wildlife responses to roads and on the spatial arrangement of roads. We questioned whether an increase in road encroachment i.e., the advancement of roads into non-urban areas, leads to significant changes (positive and negative) in species occurrence, and...
Road-kill represents a major threat for butterflies and more generally for pollinators. Here we report an observation of conspicuous aggregations of butterflies mud-puddling on roadsides and, for this reason, being massively road-killed by farm vehicles.
Implications for insect conservation While the reported observation by itself may not entail...
Supplementary information of the article "The lost road: do transportation networks imperil wildlife population persistence?"
The global road network is rapidly growing associated with human economic development. This growthalso entails a high toll for biodiversity, with several well-documented negative impacts on differentspecies. However, there is still a great lack of knowledge about the effects of roads on the persistenceof wildlife populations. Here, we aimed to summ...
Electrocution on power lines is an important human‐related cause of bird mortality and an important conservation issue worldwide. Besides impacts on bird populations, electrocutions cause power outages, resulting in damage to power line network integrity. However, there is a general lack of knowledge on the risk of bird electrocution, especially in...
The COST Action ‘European Raptor Biomonitoring Facility’ (ERBFacility) aims to develop pan-European raptor biomonitoring in support of better chemicals management in Europe, using raptors as sentinel species. This presents a significant challenge involving a range of constraints that must be identified and addressed. The aims of this study were to:...
Systematic road-kill surveys are useful to study the impact of roads on wildlife. However, they are time- and budget-consuming, so the use of non-systematic data in road ecology is currently gaining popularity (for instance, by environmental consultants). Some data sources such as atlases (i.e., compilations of species records from a given region),...
We present a dataset that assembles occurrence records of alien tetrapods (amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals) in the Iberian Peninsula, a coherent biogeographically unit where introductions of alien species have occurred for millennia. These data have important potential applications for ecological research and management, including the asses...
Road-networks and their associated motorized traffic pose a threat to biodiversity and ecosystems, with different groups of species exhibiting different avoidance responses. The often species-specific nature of these behavioural responses to roads and traffic suggest that morphological, ecological, life-history and behavioural traits could be usefu...
The most common way to quantify roadkill risk in different sections of infrastructures is to collect information on the location of casualties and then, model the probability using the environmental and infrastructure variables associated with the roadkill sites. This approach is not applicable in roads with low traffic intensity as they have a sma...
Las carreteras son una de las infraestructuras humanas que generan un
mayor impacto, siendo los atropellos de fauna su consecuencia más visible y
estudiada. La ciencia ciudadana está ganando popularidad como una fuente
de datos (también en la Ecología de Carreteras) que permite estudios a una
escala de otra forma inabarcable. Existe un debate sobre...
Inappropriate tourist behavior in protected areas can lead to wildlife road‐kills
Linear infrastructures (e.g. roads, railways or power lines) promote a myriad of negative impacts on wildlife around the world, of which direct mortality is the most visible one. When high mortality rates are found, mitigation measures are often discussed and applied. On the other hand, the lack of mortality is commonly interpreted as evidence of l...
Supplementary resources of the article: Habitat suitability vs landscape connectivity determining road-kill risk at a regional scale: a case study on European badger (Meles meles).
Collisions between wildlife and vehicles represent the main conflict between infrastructures and ecosystems. Road mortality is the largest single cause of death for many vertebrates, representing a growing phenomenon of remarkable dimension. Most studies in road ecology investigated spatial roadkill patterns, showing that roadkill probability is of...