Ella Williams's research while affiliated with University College London and other places

... The demographic collapse fell on the heels of a century of political realignment in southern Italy, in which the Norman and later Hohenstaufen dynasties were replaced through conquest by the Angevins, the ruling family of France, becoming the Kingdom of Naples in 1266 AD. For this new dynasty, which also held lands in the Balkans and Southern France, and was connected through cultural and political networks across the Mediterranean, with notably strong economic ties to northern Italy, the area of the Pollino slowly became less important (Abulafia 1981;Gilbert et al. 2017). Consequently, these forests were abandoned and left to follow a successional cycle that had essentially been suspended for three centuries, beginning a process of ''rewilding'' in the mountain subalpine belts of Pollino (Piovesan et al. 2019b). ...