Romolo Caniglia

Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA) | ISPRA · Department of Wildlife

Preserving genetic diversity and adaptive potential while avoiding inbreeding depression is crucial for the long-term conservation of natural populations. Despite demographic increases, traces of past bottleneck events at the genomic level should be carefully considered for population management. From this perspective, the peninsular Italian wolf i...

Anthropogenic hybridisation between wild and domestic taxa poses a significant threat to species integrity, including the endangered European wildcat. To enable reliable molecular assessment of admixture with domestic cats and to increase the accuracy of hybrid class assignment we optimised an existing reduced microfluidic 96 Single Nucleotide Poly...

The Sardinian wildcat (Felis silvestris lybica) belongs to a North-African lineage that reached the Mediterranean island of Sardinia in ancient times. Very little is known about the distribution and genetics of this elusive and protected species. Questionnaires, morphological and molecular analyses, and camera-trapping are implied to shed light on...

Estimating demographic parameters for wide‐ranging and elusive species living at low density is challenging, especially at the scale of an entire country. To produce wolf distribution and abundance estimates for the whole south‐central portion of the Italian wolf population, we developed an integrated spatial model, based on the data collected duri...

Generalist species, which exploit a wide range of food resources, are expected to be able to combine available resources as to attain their specific macronutrient ratio (percentage of caloric intake of protein, lipids and carbohydrates). Among mammalian predators, the red fox Vulpesvulpes is a widespread, opportunistic forager: its diet has been la...

Generalist species, which exploit a wide range of food resources, are expected to be able to combine available resources as to attain their specific macronutrient balance (intake target). Among mammalian predators, the red fox Vulpes vulpes is a widespread, opportunistic forager: its diet has been largely studied, outlining wide variation according...

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 1513 tra...

The Italian‐native Mediterranean brown trout (Salmo ghigii) is a seriously threatened freshwater fish, especially by anthropogenic hybridisation with the domestic strains of Atlantic origin that have been repeatedly released into the wild for angling. A PCR‐restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) assay of the diagnostic lactate dehydrogenas...

The Salmo trutta species complex includes threatened or intensively managed taxa. Domestic-Atlantic strains are widely farmed and massively introduced into the wild to support fisheries, although such practices seriously threaten native populations of Mediterranean brown trout through anthropogenic hybridization. Characterizing the distribution and...

Simple Summary Wildlife conservation effectiveness relies on the accuracy of population data used to build management plans. Estimating population size and dynamics of large vertebrates living on wide areas is a challenging task and results can vary depending on the methods adopted. In the present study, the size of a wolf population was estimated...

Deciphering the origins of phenotypic variations in natural animal populations is a challenging topic for evolutionary and conservation biologists. Atypical morphologies in mammals are usually attributed to interspecific hybridisation or de-novo mutations. Here we report the case of four golden jackals (Canis aureus), that were observed during a ca...

Despite a natural rewilding process that caused wolf populations in Europe to increase and expand in the last years, human-wolf conflicts still persist, threatening the long-term wolf presence in both anthropic and natural areas. Conservation management strategies should be carefully designed on updated population data and planned on a wide scale....

Disentangling phylogenetic and phylogeographic patterns is fundamental to reconstruct the evolutionary histories of taxa and assess their actual conservation status. Therefore, in this study, for the first time, the most exhaustive biogeographic history of European wildcat (Felis silvestris) populations was reconstructed by typing 430 European wild...

Non-invasive genetic sampling is a practical tool to monitor pivotal ecological parameters and population dynamic patterns of endangered species. It can be particularly suitable when applied to elusive carnivores such as the Apennine wolf (Canis lupus italicus) and the European wildcat (Felis silvestris silvestris), which can live in overlapping ec...

In the last decades, several European carnivores such as the wolf have experienced a general numerical increase and geographical re-expansion, mainly due to favourable ecological conditions and protective legislation. However, human-wolf coexistence issues and threats to long-term wolf presence are still present. Conservation and management strateg...

Human persecution and habitat decline are global threats for the wildlife, especially for large animals. Despite this trend, in Europe several large carnivore populations are growing, due to species conservation laws and changes in human activity in rural areas. In Italy, the wolf has had a recent transition from threatened to locally abundant, aft...

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...

Myocastor coypus is a semi-aquatic rodent native to South America that during the last century has become an invasive species in Europe and other parts of the world, consequently to the uncontrolled release of farmed animals into the wild. In Italy, the species is widespread throughout the peninsula and represents a serious threat for the equilibri...

The Middle Ages represented a crucial period for the evolutionary history of wolves (Canis lupus), marked by both significant ecosystem changes, especially through the degradation of wooded landscapes and heavy persecution, that drove this species to a dramatic demographic decline. In Europe, informative and well-documented wolf remains from the Me...

Large carnivores are making remarkable comebacks in Europe, but how this affects human-wildlife conflict remains unclear. Rebounding carnivore populations lead to increasing livestock depredation, which in turn leads to greater economic losses for farmers. However, returning carnivores could also influence the behavior of wild ungulates, which are...

Intra- and inter-specific gene flow are natural evolutionary processes. However, human-induced hybridization is a global conservation concern across taxa, and the development of discriminant genetic markers to differentiate among gene flow processes is essential. Wolves (Canis lupus) are affected by hybridization, particularly in southern Europe, w...

In the European Union, all bat species are strictly protected and member states must ensure their conservation. However, if populations are genetically structured, conservation units that correspond to whole countries may be too large, putting small populations with specific conservation requirements at risk. Geoffroy's bat (Myotis emarginatus) has...

Human activities can globally modify natural ecosystems determining ecological, demographic and range perturbations for several animal species. These changes can jeopardize native gene pools in different ways, leading either to genetic homogenization, or conversely, to the split into genetically divergent demes. In the past decades, most European w...

Hybridisation between wild and domestic taxa raises complex questions for conservation. Genetic advances offer new methods for hybrid identification, yet social and cultural factors can influence study design, and the interpretation, application, and communication of results. A relevant illustration is hybridisation between domestic dogs (Canis lup...

The canine adenovirus type 2 (CAdV-2) is associated with the infectious tracheobronchitis commonly called "kennel cough", cosmopolitan in dogs but little explored in gray wolves. Our goals were (i) to evaluate the presence and circulation of CAdV-2 in free-ranging Italian wolves (Canis lupus italicus), through the analysis of spleens and tongues co...

Wolves (Canis lupus), like most wild carnivores, are elusive and usually live at low density; this makes it challenging to monitor specific individuals through time. Non-invasive genetic sampling, when protracted over a long period and a sufficiently large geographic scale, has revealed an effective tool to follow individual patterns in a populatio...

Over the last 40 years the gray wolf (Canis lupus) re-colonized its historical range in Italy increasing human-predator interactions. However, temporal and spatial trends in wolf mortality, including direct and indirect persecution, were never summarized. This study aims to fill this gap by focusing on the situation of Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna re...

Over the last 40 years the gray wolf (Canis lupus) re-colonized its historical range in Italy increasing human-predator interactions. However, temporal and spatial trends in wolf mortality, including direct and indirect persecution, were never summarized. This study aims to fill this gap by focusing on the situation of Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna re...

Background Understanding the processes that lead to hybridization of wolves and dogs is of scientific and management importance, particularly over large geographical scales, as wolves can disperse great distances. However, a method to efficiently detect hybrids in routine wolf monitoring is lacking. Microsatellites offer only limited resolution due...

Marmora’s Warbler ( Curruca sarda ) and Balearic Warbler ( C. balearica ) are allopatric sibling species and were recently split mostly based on morphological and ethological characteristics. Here we provide the first phylogenetic and phylogeographic analyses of this species complex to support the taxonomic status of C. sarda and C. balearica in li...

Introgressive hybridization between domestic dogs and wolves (Canis lupus) represents an em-blematic case of anthropogenic hybridization and is increasingly threatening the genomic integrity of wolf populations expanding into human-modified landscapes. But studies formally estimating prevalence and accounting for imperfect detectability and uncerta...

Dog domestication is still largely unresolved due to time-gaps in the sampling of regions. Ancient Italian canids are particularly understudied, currently represented by only a few specimens. In the present study, we sampled 27 canid remains from Northern Italy dated between the Late Pleistocene and Bronze Age to assess their genetic variability, a...

Background Understanding the processes that lead to hybridization of wolves and dogs is of scientific and management importance, particularly over large geographical scales, as wolves can disperse great distances. However, a method to efficiently detect hybrids in routine wolf monitoring is lacking. Microsatellites offer only limited resolution due...

The grey wolf (Canis lupus) is one of the most widely distributed mammals in which a variety of distinct populations have been described. However, given their currently fragmented distribution and recent history of human-induced population decline, little is known about the events that led to their differentiation. Based on the analysis of whole ca...

This case report describes the rescue of an eight-month-old male Italian wolf (Canis lupus italicus), the victim of a car accident that caused it a pulmonary contusion, a fracture of the shaft of right femur, and a metaphyseal fracture of the left stifle. A lateral surgical approach was performed to treat the animal’s multiple contusions and fractu...

Anthropogenic hybridization is recognized as a major threat to the long-term survival of natural populations. While identifying F1 hybrids might be simple, the detection of older admixed individuals is far from trivial and it is still debated whether they should be targets of management. Examples of anthropogenic hybridization have been described b...

Globally, large carnivore livestock predations are major causes of conflicts with humans, thus identifying hotspots of carnivore attacks is fundamental to reduce the impact of these, and hence promote coexistence with humans. Species distribution models combining predictor variables with locations of predation events instead of species occurrences...

The survival of indigenous European wildcat (Felis silvestris silvestris) populations can be locally threatened by introgressive hybridization with free-ranging domestic cats. Identifying pure wildcats and investigating the ancestry of admixed individuals becomes thus a conservation priority. We analyzed 63k cat Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNP...

Faecal non-invasive genetic sampling is one of the most practicable, ethical and applied tools to investigate the biology and the ecology of elusive or endangered mammal populations. However, the reliability, accuracy and effectiveness of this technique may be deeply conditioned by several factors such as climate, habitat characteristics, seasonali...

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...

Background: The contemporary Italian wolf (Canis lupus italicus) represents a case of morphological and genetic uniqueness. Today, Italian wolves are also the only documented population to fall exclusively within the mitochondrial haplogroup 2, which was the most diffused across Eurasian and North American wolves during the Late Pleistocene. Howeve...

We report the detection of canine adenovirus type 1 DNA by real-time PCR technique in an oral sample of an Italian wolf ( Canis lupus italicus). Genetic characterization of the virus revealed a strict relationship with viruses detected in dogs ( Canis lupus familiaris), wolves, and red foxes ( Vulpes vulpes), suggesting that transmission between wi...

During historical times many local grey wolf (Canis lupus) populations underwent a substantial reduction of their sizes or became extinct. Among these, the wolf population once living in Sicily, the biggest island of the Mediterranean Sea, was completely eradicated by human persecution in the early decades of the XX century. In order to understand...

1. Estimating the relative abundance (prevalence) of different population segments is a key step in addressing fundamental research questions in ecology, evolution and conservation. The raw percentage of individuals in the sample (naive prevalence) is generally used for this purpose, but it is likely to be subject to two main sources of bias. First...

The black-footed cat (Felis nigripes) is the smallest felid of Southern Africa, endemic to the arid steppe and savannah habitats. However, though threatened and characterized by decreasing sizes of its populations, a number of ecological, demographic, sanitary, and genetic aspects, essential for the long-term conservation of the species, still rema...

During historical times many local grey wolf (Canis lupus) populations underwent a substantial reduction of their sizes or became extinct. Among these, the wolf population once living in Sicily, the biggest island of the Mediterranean Sea, was completely eradicated by human persecution in the early decades of the XX century. In order to understand...

The distribution of intraspecific genetic variation and how it relates to environmental factors is of increasing interest to researchers in macroecology and biogeography. Recent studies investigated the relationships between the environment and patterns of intraspecific genetic variation across species ranges but only few rigorously tested the rela...

The origin and the genetic uniqueness of the Italian grey wolf (Canis lupus italicus) have been the subject of several stud- ies. Recent works describe the spatial-temporal distribution of 2 ecomorphs, one of which (HG2), associated to Pleistocene megafauna, was dominant in Europe and America during the last glacial maximum (LGM). After the followi...

Background Genomic methods can provide extraordinary tools to explore the genetic background of wild species and domestic breeds, optimize breeding practices, monitor and limit the spread of recessive diseases, and discourage illegal crossings. In this study we analysed a panel of 170k Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms with a combination of multivari...

Introduction - Anthropogenic hybridization is increasingly studied as serious conservation threat for the genetic integrity of local populations although the detection of hybrids or backcrosses is often far from trivial. We developed an effective workflow to detect different levels of genetic introgression, by using empirical and simulated data fro...

Wolf-dog hybridization is considered as one of the main threats for wolf conservation since the admixture and introgression of domestic genes may disrupt local adaptations and threaten the long term survival of wild wolf populations. We investigated the occurrence of wolf-dog hybridization in Croatia by analyzing a panel of 12 autosomal microsatell...