Pablo Palencia

Università degli Studi di Torino | UNITO · Dipartimento di Scienze Veterinarie

African swine fever (ASF) is a highly contagious disease affecting all suids and wild boar (Sus scrofa). Since 2007, ASF has spread to more than 30 countries in Europe and Asian regions, and the most recent outbreak has been in mainland Italy (reported on January 2022). When the genotype II of the ASF virus infects a population, a mortality rate cl...

In the One Health context, Integrated Wildlife Monitoring (IWM) merges wildlife health monitoring (WHM) and host community monitoring to early detect emerging infections, record changes in disease dynamics, and assess the impact of interventions in complex multi-host and multi-pathogen networks. This study reports the deployment and results obtaine...

El mapache Procyon lotor (Linnaeus, 1758) es un mesocarnívoro originario del centro y norte de América que ha conseguido expandir su área de distribución enormemente gracias a introducciones y escapes de granjas y zoológicos. En España, tras las primeras observaciones realizadas a principios de siglo XXI como consecuencia de escapes de núcleos zool...

La estima de densidades poblacionales es un parámetro fundamental para la toma de decisiones en el ámbito de la conservación y la gestión la fauna silvestre. En este sentido, el uso de fototrampeo como herramienta para monitorizar los tamaños poblacionales ha ido adquiriendo importancia en los últimos 20 años, dándose un gran desarrollo tecnológico...

Human–wildlife conflicts are a growing problem in Northern Hemisphere where wild ungulates are one of the taxonomic groups most frequently involved. To mitigate these conflicts, it is essential to develop preventive actions able to avoid encounters between wildlife and human (activities). We here employed photo-trapping to evaluate the behaviour of...

Population density estimates are important for wildlife conservation and management. Several camera trapping‐based methods for estimating densities have been developed, one of which, the random encounter model (REM), has been widely applied due to its practical advantages such as no need for species‐specific study design. Nevertheless, most of the...

Abstract This report presents the results of field activities in relation to the generation of reliable wild boar density values by camera trapping (CT) in 19 areas in Europe, mainly in East Europe. Random Encounter Model (REM) densities ranged from 0.35±0.24 to 15.25±2.41 (SE) individuals/km2. No statistical differences in density among bioregion...

A better understanding of population density (i.e. the number of individuals per unit area) is essential for wildlife conservation and management. Despite the fact that a wide variety of methods with which to estimate population density have already been described and broadly used, there are still relevant gaps. In the last few decades, the use of...

Contexto Probabilidad de detección Objetivo: identificar los factores que afectan a la probabilidad de detección y velocidad de disparo de las cámaras Fig. Diseño experimental Métodos 5 modelos Resultados & discusión CONCLUSIONES La probabilidad de detectar un individuo de una especie dada depende del modelo de cámara usado (no todas las cámaras de...

Camera trapping is a widely used tool in wildlife research and conservation, and a plethora of makes and models of camera traps have emerged. However, insufficient attention has been paid to testing their performance, particularly under field conditions. In this study, we have comparatively tested five of the most frequently used makes of camera tr...

Methods for estimating population densities of unmarked species using camera traps are still under development. One such method is called "Random Encounter Model (REM)" and, to our knowledge, has never been used to estimate densities of mountaindwelling ungulates. In this study, we tested the REM method to estimate the density of Balkan chamois ( R...

Wildlife populations are experiencing drastic changes in their areas of distribution and abundance in the last decades and, therefore, population monitoring programs should be implemented to support effective management strategies. In this case, we have focused on the Iberian wild goat (Capra pyrenaica) population nucleus from Parque Natural Valle...

Bluetongue is a vector-borne disease affecting domestic and wild ruminants, with a major socioeconomic impact. Endemic circulation of the bluetongue virus serotype 4 (BTV-4) and BTV-1 have occurred in Spain since 2004 and 2007, respectively. However, epidemiological studies have seldom been approached from a long-term perspective in wild ruminants....

Population density estimations are essential for wildlife management and conservation. Camera traps have become a promising cost‐effective tool, for which several methods have been described to estimate population density when individuals are unrecognisable (i.e. unmarked populations). However, comparative tests of their applicability and performan...

Camera‐trapping methods have been used to monitor movement and behavioural ecology parameters of wildlife. However, some concerns have emerged. For instance, some wildlife populations present movement patterns characteristic of each behaviour (e.g. foraging or displacement between habitat patches), and further research is needed to integrate the be...

Toxoplasma gondii is an obligate intracellular protozoan which infects warm-blooded vertebrates, including humans, worldwide. In the present study, the epidemiology of T. gondii was studied in the wild ungulate host community (wild boar, red deer, and fallow deer) of Doñana National Park (DNP, south-western Spain) for 13 years (2005–2018). We asses...

Camera trapping use has increased significantly in ecological studies in recent decades due to its ability to register information about cryptic and/or elusive species and, more recently, due to its ability to derive population parameters, such as population abundance or density. For these latter applications, camera traps set in a regular grid pat...

Animal tuberculosis (TB) is endemic in wild boar (Sus scrofa), red deer (Cervus elaphus), fallow deer (Dama dama) and cattle in south and central Spain. In order to clarify the processes that operate in the medium and long-term, we studied TB at the wildlife–livestock interface in Doñana National Park for 14 years (2006–2018) in relation to host de...

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...

Day range (DR), the distance travelled by an individual during the day, is an important metric in movement ecology that recently gained interest by its relevance for estimating population density through the random encounter model (REM). Traditionally, DR has been estimated using GPS technology and considering raw straight-line distances between co...

Distance sampling (DS) is a widely used method to estimate the population density of wild species. However, the precision of the estimates must be reduced to be effective in a monitoring program. This precision depends on the variability in group size, encounter rate and detection function. In gregarious species it is recommended to carry out sampl...

Knowledge about distribution and abundance of European wild mammals is essential for their conservation and management. ENETWILD consortium (www.enetwild.com) has been collecting presence and abundance data of wild boar, which will be completed with other wild mammals in the next years. Using the wild boar as a example, we develop a general framewo...

R code to resize photos obtained by camera-traps. The code allows resizing photos stored in different folders (e.g. a folder for each photo-trapping point). Useful to optimize the storage of information.

El muestreo de distancias (Distance Sampling, DS) es un método ampliamente usado para estimar la densidad de una población y actualmente es considerado uno de los métodos de referencia para el seguimiento poblacional de ungulados silvestres. El DS está basado en el concepto teórico de que la probabilidad de detectar un individuo disminuye según aum...

The Random Encounter Model (REM) allows for estimating wildlife population density based on camera-traps data without individual recognition. Day range (DR; i.e. daily distance traveled by an individual) is the most costly and time-consuming parameter for applying REM. Despite DR were traditionally estimated from telemetry data, several authors sho...

The Random Encounter Model (REM) is a method based on camera-traps data for estimating wildlife population densities without individual recognition. Although there are a plethora of methodologies to estimate wildlife population densities, for some relevant and elusive species, e.g. wild boar, there is not a feasible and reliable method able to deri...

El rango diario de desplazamiento (RD), entendido como la distancia recorrida por un individuo a lo largo del día, es un parámetro ecológico que ha sido tradicionalmente calculado mediante telemetría, asumiendo para ello trayectorias lineales entre localizaciones consecutivas. Sin embargo, la trayectoria que siguen los individuos entre dos localiza...

Day range (DR) is an ecological parameter that indicates the distance travelled by one animal over the day. DR is needed to estimate density of wildlife populations through random encounter model (REM), one of the most promising methods for monitoring wildlife since: i) produces population density values, and ii) based in camera trapping, allows us...

Day range and travel speed are important ecological variables that are usually measured by telemetry assuming straight-line distances between intermittent relocations of tagged animals. However, recent studies showed that telemetry can notably underestimate these parameters, mainly due to high tortuosity in animal paths. Here, we estimated travel s...