Being in the right place at the right time: wolves spatio-temporal niche in a human-altered environment

• Main Author: MANCINELLI, SARA
• Other Authors: Mancinelli, Sara, CIUCCI, Paolo
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Università degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza" 2018
• Subjects: Canis lupus; gray wolf; Gulo gulo; Ursus arctos; Lynx; Lynx lynx lynx
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/11573/1067197

Large carnivores are among the most controversial and challenging group of species to manage and conserve, because of the conflict they raise with human interests. As a group, large carnivores exert a strong influence on biological communities via predation and inter-specific competition, as well as by limiting and often regulating the numbers of their prey. At the same time, there is a strong hostility to these species in human history and culture, because of perceptions of their negative impacts on human livelihoods. Human-carnivore conflict mainly arises because carnivores' protein-rich diet and large home ranges draw them into recurrent competition with humans for food and space. As this competition over food and space show no sign of reduction, an intuitive forecast could be that large carnivores will persist only in protected areas or in some remote and uninhabited wilderness areas. The alternative scenario follows a landscape-scale conservation approach that aims at human-carnivore coexistence in a shared environment through conflict mitigation programs. This approach seemed to be realistic in Europe, that is succeeding in maintaining, and to some extent restoring, viable large carnivore populations on a continental scale. This has recently been reported for four large carnivore species, e.g., wolf (Canis lupus), brown bear (Ursus arctos), wolverine (Gulo gulo) and lynx (Lynx lynx), that are persisting in human-dominated landscapes and largely outside protected areas in the European continent (Chapron et al. 2014). Among these species, the gray wolf proved to be the most adaptable to live in proximity to humans, and therefore represents a good model species to investigate the questions on human-carnivore coexistence. In my PhD thesis, I considered a specific case study of coexistence between humans and the gray wolf. I focused on the wolf population of the Abruzzo, Lazio and Molise National Park (PNALM), located in the central Apennines (Italy), and representing one of the few historical strongholds of ...