From the Andes to the Apennines: Rise and Fall of a Free-Ranging Population of Feral Llamas

Since 2016, a feral population of llama Lama glama has been present in Central Italy after escaping from a zoological garden and starting to reproduce. We updated demographic status and distribution of this population and investigated societal perception towards the llama presence and management in the area through a standard questionnaire. Field data were collected through direct (transects traveled by car and on foot) and indirect (newspapers, social networks and online platforms) research. The feral population appears to be declining. In July 2020, the population was represented by three individuals (one male and two females), identified also through photoidentification, most likely located within a 40-hectare area. The majority of citizens are aware of the presence of feral llamas and show a positive attitude toward them and a negative one toward management actions. The case of feral llamas in Italy is an evident example of unsafe management of a species which should have kept in a zoo and which, once set free, was able to catalyze the attention of the general public. The decline of this population limits the need of drastic management actions that, given the appreciation expressed by people and press toward these animals, would have been at risk of conflict with the public opinion. Removal action should be rapidly taken, i.e., before any demographic rebound and before the population becomes a stable feature of the local landscape.

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Bridled Quail-dove Geotrygon mystacea population assessment after hurricanes Irma and Maria, St. Eustatius, Caribbean Netherlands

Bird Conservation International ◽

10.1017/s0959270920000647 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-12

Author(s):

FRANK F. RIVERA-MILÁN ◽

HANNAH MADDEN ◽

KEVIN VERDEL

Keyword(s):

National Park ◽

Food Limitation ◽

Distance Sampling ◽

Population Status ◽

Management Actions ◽

Abundance Estimates ◽

Detection Mode ◽

Limited Food ◽

Seed Eating ◽

Free Ranging

Summary Structural vegetation damage and food limitation are important effects of major hurricanes, particularly for fruit/seed-eating, forest-dependent Caribbean birds with restricted distributions and small populations, such as the Bridled Quail-dove Geotrygon mystacea. Motivated by the lack of abundance estimates, corrected for detection probability, we conducted distance-sampling surveys inside and outside the Quill National Park each May in 2016-2019. Detection mode was the most important covariate, with others receiving no support from the data. Detectability of available single individuals and clusters of individuals within 60 m of transect centrelines averaged 0.957 ± 0.114 standard error for audio detections, 0.434 ± 0.052 for visual detections, and 0.693 ± 0.064 for detection modes combined. Availability averaged 0.475 ± 0.138 and the product of detectability and availability averaged 0.329 ± 0.098. Density averaged 1.459 ± 0.277 individuals ha-1 and population size averaged 642 ± 122 individuals in 440 ha. Density did not differ along and away from forest trails, but was higher inside than outside the park and at elevations within 201-400 m than 100-200 m and 401-600 m. Density declined by 76% after hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017. We suggest that major hurricanes together with free-ranging livestock overgrazing degraded foraging habitats, limited food supply, and caused a population bottleneck. Our methodology can be implemented across the distribution range to assess population status and trends and evaluate the result of management actions at key conservation sites. Bridled Quail-dove populations probably were declining on most islands before the 2017 hurricanes and population status warrants revision.

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Management of Publicly Owned Forests

The Forestry Chronicle ◽

10.5558/tfc64193-3 ◽

1988 ◽

Vol 64 (3) ◽

pp. 193-198 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

G. Baskerville

Keyword(s):

Productive Capacity ◽

The Public ◽

Management Actions ◽

Proper Form ◽

The People ◽

Resource Dynamics ◽

Industrial Use ◽

Publicly Owned ◽

Over Exploitation ◽

Public Forests

For two reasons, planning and implementing management for publicly-owned forests is conducted in an environment that almost guarantees failure. First, group ownership is associated with a strong tendency towards over-exploitation (the tragedy of the commons), and second public ownership entails a heavy administrative overhead.The public allows industry to use publicly-owned forests and spends the revenue from exploitation on roads, schools health care, unemployment insurance and so on. The public owners are unwilling to limit industrial use of the forest to keep it in balance with the productive capacity of the forests because this would limit the benefits they receive and because they do not as individuals experience the shared cost of exploitation. Meanwhile, the people who own 90% of Canada's forests have until recently seen fit to spend only 5% of the taxes derived from their industrial use for maintaining their productive capacity. In effect the people of Canada are slum landlords. Like slum landlords, they have not returned to their properties enough money for their basic maintenance. The biggest problem in managing our public forests is in overcoming the owners' resistance to spending enough of the money generated by the forests to manage them in a technically adequate way over long period of time.The second major problem is the tendency of the agencies managing publicly-owned forests to shift from managing the forest to managing its use. This arises partly from the way in which the owners (the public) participate in the management process and partly because public money is used for management.The public owns the resource and must set goals. Unfortunately because they are so remote from the property and their understanding of resource dynamics is so trivial, the public tend to state vague goals accompanied by specific management actions with little thought to the cause/effect connections between them. Technically designed management tends to be over-ridden by socially comfortable solutions that do not solve the real management problems existing in the woods.Use of public funds necessitates creating a paper trail satisfactory to auditors. Consequently professionals responsible for managing the public forests find themselves spending more and more time ensuring that the administrative reporting of actions taken is up to date and in the proper form, and less and less time ensuring that the actions taken are the technically right ones to achieve the stated goals in the forest.

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DISTRIBUTION AND GENETIC ANALYSIS OF WILD-LIVING EURASIAN BEAVERS IN CENTRAL ITALY

Redia ◽

10.19263/redia-104.21.24 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 104 ◽

pp. 209-215

Author(s):

EMILIANO MORI ◽

ANDREA VIVIANO ◽

LEONARDO BRUSTENGA ◽

FRANCESCO OLIVETTI ◽

LUCA PEPPUCCI ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Social Perception ◽

Hair Sample ◽

Central Italy ◽

Protected Species ◽

Conservation Action ◽

Eurasian Beaver ◽

Marche Region ◽

Free Ranging ◽

Management And Conservation ◽

Potential Origin

The presence of the Eurasian beaver Castor fiber L. has been recently confirmed with two separated populations in Tuscany (Central Italy) and probably represents the result of an unofficial release. In late spring and summer 2021, seven reliable records of Eurasian beaver have been collected in Umbria and other neighbouring regions, implying that the distribution of this large rodent is even wider than previously reported. In this short work, we updated the distribution of this protected species in Central Italy, by collecting and mapping all the confirmed occurrences. Beavers were proved to be present throughout the Tiber (Tevere) river basin in both provinces of Umbria, and another individual has been road-killed in the Marche region, near the border with Tuscany. Other single signs of presence occurred in Emilia Romagna and Latium. The only hair sample we were able to collect confirmed it as the Eurasian beaver species. No reliable evidence is available on the number of free-ranging beavers in Central Italy, and systematic monitoring is needed. Before any management and conservation action, further data are required concerning distribution range, potential origin, social perception, and the effects on the ecosystems.

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The enhancement of the territory through art: application of a dissemination method to the Valmarecchia and Montefeltro area (North-Central Italy)

10.5194/egusphere-egu21-14939 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Laura Valentini ◽

Veronica Guerra ◽

Maurizio Lazzari ◽

Olivia Nesci

Keyword(s):

Public Awareness ◽

Central Italy ◽

Popular Science ◽

Common Interest ◽

Cognitive Domain ◽

Communication Styles ◽

Emotional Engagement ◽

North Central ◽

Origin And Evolution ◽

The Public

In this work, we propose a new approach to communicate science using art forms, such as music and poetry, in order to encourage people to learn more about landscapes. This approach was born from a desire to promote the landscape by integrating its origins and physical aesthetics with its naturalistic, cultural and artistic heritage, through narratives in popular science style, supported by the language of art. The different disciplines of Earth Science, poetry and music are applied together to specific sites, producing emotional experiences where encounter and interplay between the different languages become an expression of the place.This experience started few years ago in 2014 and was linked by a common interest in enhancement of the territory. The team is composed of researchers and artists with different skills, whose aim is to promote deeper public awareness of the territory, by means of proposing live events and presenting the idea in international scientific conferences and journals. After a project dedicated to 20 geosites in the Marche Region (Central Italy), which took place from February 2018 to February 2020 and resulted in a book in the native language (Nesci and Valentini 2019) and a website presenting a summary of it, we are now approaching a new region in North-Central Italy. The Valmarecchia and Montefeltro areas are well known by geologists and scientists from all over the world for the particular origin and evolution of the Valmarecchia nappe, which consists of stacked slices of Ligurian and Epiligurian rocks overthrusting Tuscan and Umbro-Marchean Units and producing unique geological landscapes (Guerra and Lazzari, 2020). The study area is also well known by historians and artists for its great cultural value, but poorly understood by tourists and locals.The research has identified several geological landscapes in the study area that could be used as field test sites to experiment different communication styles for dissemination of geological values. The methodology proposed in this paper aims to experiment the involvement level of the participants, engaged through the use of conventional and unconventional means in the popularization of Earth Sciences, such as music and art, directly in the field. These experiences will be included in series of treks conducted with different approaches (i.e. classic guided tours, exploring experiences, interactive engagement of the public in narrative and emotional engagement through music and art). The aim is to collect data about the involvement of the public and to verify whether incisiveness of geological concepts, conveyed within the affective domain of learning (i.e. engagement, attitude, and emotion), differs from the one deriving from the involvement of the cognitive domain (i.e. comprehension and application) (Nesci and Valentini, 2020).Our goal is to educate by creating a new perception of geological landscapes, starting with their physical beauty and then building on scientific research in co-operation with arts, in order to improve what we know about their problems and weaknesses, and addressing their culture and their other strengths as well.

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Analysis of Public Sentiments About Mega Online Sale Using Tweets on Big Billions Day Sale

Advances in Business Information Systems and Analytics - Sentiment Analysis and Knowledge Discovery in Contemporary Business ◽

10.4018/978-1-5225-4999-4.ch005 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 59-76 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Dilip Singh Sisodia ◽

Ritvika Reddy

Keyword(s):

Social Networking ◽

Sentiment Analysis ◽

Stock Exchange ◽

The Public ◽

Online Sales ◽

Public Sentiment ◽

Online Platforms ◽

Wide Range ◽

Automated Process ◽

The Web

The opinion of others significantly influences our decision-making process about any product or service. The positive or negative opinions of prospective clients or customers may promote or demote the profit margin of any business activities. Therefore, analyzing the public sentiment is important for many applications such as firms trying to find out the response of their products in the market, predicting political elections, and predicting socioeconomic phenomena such as stock exchange, sale of products, etc. With the emergence of Web 2.0 services, a wide range of online platforms including micro-blogging, social networking, and many other review platforms are available. The automated process for public sentiment analysis from a large amount of social data present on the web helps to improve customer satisfaction. This chapter discusses the process of sentiment analysis of prospective buyers of mega online sales using their posted tweets about the big billions day sale.

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Growth patterns in free-ranging bank voles, Myodes glareolus (Schreber 1780) from a mountainous area in central Italy

Mammalia ◽

10.1515/mamm.2010.063 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 75 (1) ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Giovanni Amori ◽

Luca Luiselli

Keyword(s):

Central Italy ◽

Growth Patterns ◽

Myodes Glareolus ◽

Mountainous Area ◽

Bank Voles ◽

Free Ranging

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Communicating earthquake information to the public in Italy: ten years of INGVterremoti

10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-18816 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

alessandro amato ◽

Emanuele Casarotti ◽

Valentino Lauciani ◽

Carlo Meletti ◽

Concetta Nostro ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Social Media ◽

Scientific Information ◽

Central Italy ◽

Careful Analysis ◽

Public Communication ◽

Earthquake Activity ◽

The Public ◽

First Choice ◽

Civil Trials ◽

Media Channels

Communicating earthquake scientific information is very important in countries like Italy, where seismic sequences are frequent, seismic risk is high, and people&#8217;s perception of risk is strongly affected by fear.After the 2009 earthquake in L&#8217;Aquila (central Italy), which claimed 309 casualties and triggered a long lasting dispute among scientists, journalists, citizens, including a suite of criminal and civil trials involving scientists and civil protection officers, the scientific and risk communication in Italy (not only on earthquakes) was facing a crossroad. The first choice (feared at that time by many reporters) was to minimize or even elude public communication, in order to avoid misunderstandings and involvement in litigations. The second possibility was to increase the efforts in public communication, getting closer to citizens. INGV definitely opted for the second choice. In the past ten years the INGVterremoti platform has augmented and differentiated its activities on the web and social media, substantially increasing the number of involved people, which amounts today to several hundreds thousand. The platform consists of a coordinated suite of social media channels, including Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and a blog (on wordpress), where we publish both updating during earthquake sequences and scientific topics. Our end users are mostly citizens, but also media and authorities. Our tweets on earthquake activity are often in the first pages of web and TV news magazines.In September 2018, we started publishing automatic locations/magnitudes for earthquakes in Italy with magnitude equal to or larger than 3, after a careful analysis of the thresholds and of the best format to use, in order to warrant message understandability and to minimize false or incorrect information. This issue is very critical both to provide the best and fastest information to citizens, and to increase people&#8217;s trust in scientific information and institutions. These are often blamed by citizens and by media when contradictory information is offered to the public. We will present an analysis of the first 18 months of this testing phase, which has been widely appreciated by the public.

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