Ricerc@Sapienza

Socotra Island, in the western Indian Ocean, harbors high biodiversity and endemism and makes up the largest part of the Socotra archipelago UNESCO World Heritage site. Its climatic, pedological, and geomorphological characteristics, together with the long geological isolation and inaccessibility, led to the flourishing of unique tree diversity, with great cultural and ecological value. Lately, trees on Socotra are facing new threats linked to the abandonment of traditional management practices, climate change impacts, and growing human pressure.

This paper reviews the past distribution of Aleppo pine woodlands in the Ebro Basin, Northeastern Iberia, from the Mesolithic to Modern times based on wood charcoal data. The aim is to detail the chronological timing and the drivers explaining the long-term presence of Aleppo pine woodlands and associated thermophilous flora. The available charcoal data support the early spread of Pinus halepensis during the Mesolithic (ca. 9000 cal BP) accompanied by Mediterranean trees and shrubs like Quercus sp.

In this study, we present lipid biomarker and palynological data for a sediment core from Lake Dojran (Macedonia/Greece), which covers the entire Holocene period. We analyzed vascular plant-derived n-alkanes, combustion-derived polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), fecal steroids, and bacterial and archaeal glycerol dialkyl glycerol tetraether (GDGT) lipids in concert with microcharcoal and pollen assemblages to reconstruct climatic, environmental, and human impact in the Dojran catchment and the greater Dojran area.

Understanding marine mammal distributions is essential for conservation, as it can help identify critical habitat where management action can be taken. The semi-enclosed Gulf of Corinth, Greece, has been identified as an Important Marine Mammal Area by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Marine Mammal Protected Areas Task Force, based on the regular occurrence of odontocete populations.

Understanding changes in species distributions is essential to disentangle the mechanisms that drive their responses to anthropogenic habitat modification. Here we analyse the past (1970s) and current (2017) distribution of 204 species of terrestrial non-volant mammals to identify drivers of recent contraction and expansion in their range. We find 106 species lost part of their past range, and 40 of them declined by >50%. The key correlates of this contraction are large body mass, increase in air temperature, loss of natural land, and high human population density.

Anthropogenic and biotic disturbances have the potential to interact, generating cumulative impacts on animal movement or, alternatively, counterbalancing or masking each other. Despite their importance, those interactions have not been investigated thoroughly. Our study aimed to fill this knowledge gap by assessing the combined effects of a human activity—that is, military exercises—and a biotic disturbance—that is, insect harassment—on movement rates of free-ranging semidomesticated reindeer (Rangifer tarandus tarandus).

Aim: Human activities have led to hundreds of species extinctions and have narrowed the distribution of many of the remaining species. These changes influence our understanding of global macroecological patterns, but their effects have been rarely explored. One of these patterns, the Bergmann's rule, has been largely investigated in macroecology, but often under the assumption that observed patterns reflect “natural” processes.

The Costa Concordia shipwreck permitted to assess how multiple disturbances affected marine biota at different spatial and temporal scales, evaluating the effects of mechanical and physical disturbances on Posidonia oceanica (L.) Delile, an endemic seagrass species of the Mediterranean Sea. To assess the impacts of the shipwreck and its salvaging from 2012 to 2017 at a population and a landscape level, a diversified approach was applied based on the application of a geographical information system coupled with seascape metrics and structural descriptors.

A new high-resolution pollen and NPP (non- pollen palynomorph) analysis has been performed on the sediments of Lake Dojran, a transboundary lake located at the border between Greece and the former Yugoslav Re- public of Macedonia (FYROM). The sequence covers the last 12500 years and provides information on the vegeta- tional dynamics of the Late Glacial and Holocene for the southern Balkans. Robust age model, sedimentological di- atom, and biomarker analyses published previously have been the base for a multi-perspective interpretation of the new palynological data.