Ricerc@Sapienza

Notarchirico (Southern Italy) has yielded the earliest evidence of Acheulean settlement in Italy and four older occupation levels have recently been unearthed, including one with bifaces, extending the roots of the Acheulean in Italy even further back in time. New 40Ar/39Ar on tephras and ESR dates on bleached quartz securely and accurately place these occupations between 695 and 670 ka (MIS 17), penecontemporaneous with the Moulin-Quignon and la Noira sites (France).

As rates of global warming increase rapidly, identifying species at risk of decline dueto climate impacts and the factors affecting this risk have become key challenges inecology and conservation biology. Here, we present a framework for assessing threecomponents of climate-related risk for species: vulnerability, exposure and hazard.We used the relationship between the observed response of species to climatechange and a set of intrinsic traits (e.g. weaning age) and extrinsic factors (e.g.

Ongoing perturbations in the global climate have triggered changes in the frequency or magnitude of extreme climatic events, including drought. Increasingly common or intense droughts have threatened ungulates. Intensifying trend of drought has been observed in China since the 1980s. We assessed drought vulnerability of 60 ungulate taxa distributed in China by synthesizing information on drought exposure and intrinsic vulnerability related to biological traits.

Aim: To evaluate how environment and evolutionary history interact to influence global patterns of mammal trait diversity (a combination of 14 morphological and life-history traits). Location: The global terrestrial environment. Taxon: Terrestrial mammals. Methods: We calculated patterns of spatial turnover for mammalian traits and phylogenetic lineages using the mean nearest taxon distance. We then used a variance partitioning approach to establish the relative contribution of trait conservatism, ecological adaptation and clade specific ecological preferences on global trait turnover.

The IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) Red List categories and criteria are the most widely used framework for assessing the relative extinction risk of species. The criteria are based on quantitative thresholds relating to the size, trends, and structure of species’ distributions and populations. However, data on these parameters are sparse and uncertain for many species and unavailable for others, potentially leading to their misclassification or classification as data deficient.

Growing domestic and international ethanol demand is expected to result in increased sugarcane cultivation in Brazil. Sugarcane expansion currently results in land-use changes mainly in the Cerrado and Atlantic Forest biomes, two severely threatened biodiversity hotspots. This study quantifies potential biodiversity impacts of increased ethanol demand in Brazil in a spatially explicit manner. We project changes in potential total, threatened, endemic, and range-restricted mammals' species richness up to 2030.

Aim: Although the effects of life history traits on population density have been investigated widely, how spatial environmental variation influences population density for a large range of organisms and at a broad spatial scale is poorly known. Filling this knowledge gap is crucial for global species management and conservation planning and to understand the potential impact of environmental changes on multiple species.

Location: Global.

Time period: Present.

Major taxa studied: Terrestrial amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals.

Predicting how species respond to human pressure is essential to anticipate their decline and identify appropriate conservation strategies. Both human pressure and extinction risk change over time, but their inter-relationship is rarely considered in extinction risk modelling. Here we measure the relationship between the change in terrestrial human footprint (HFP)-representing cumulative human pressure on the environment-and the change in extinction risk of the world's terrestrial mammals.

Although it is widely accepted that future climatic change-if unabated-is likely to have major impacts on biodiversity(1,2), few studies have attempted to quantify the number of species whose populations have already been impacted by climate change(3,4). Using a systematic review of published literature, we identified mammals and birds for which there is evidence that they have already been impacted by climate change.

Although habitat fragmentation is often assumed to be a primary driver of extinction, global patterns of fragmentation and its relationship to extinction risk have not been consistently quantified for any major animal taxon. We developed high-resolution habitat fragmentation models and used phylogenetic comparative methods to quantify the effects of habitat fragmentation on the world's terrestrial mammals, including 4,018 species across 26 taxonomic Orders.