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Antonia Pozzi (Milan 1912-1938) does not believe in a confessional God. According to her, God comes alive in human heart. The poet, thanks to her sensitivity and personality, had a strong spirituality. Her ascensional tension and research of sense and absolute (with all the distress that comes with it) have been aconstant ofherlife,whichculminatedinthelovefortheProf.Cervi and found expression through the love for human being and the creation of poetry., Materiali di Estetica. Terza serie, N. 5.2 (2018): Le parole di Dio

Despite its critical conservation status, no formal estimate of the Apennine brown bear (Ursus arctos marsicanus) distribution has ever been attempted, nor a coordinated effort to compile and verify all recent occurrences has ever been ensured. We used 48331 verified bear location data collected by qualified personnel from 2005-2014 in the central Apennines, Italy, to estimate the current distribution of Apennine brown bears. Data sources included telemetry relocations (86%), scats and DNA-verified hair samples (11.3%), sightings (1.1%), indirect signs of presence (1.1%), photos from camera traps (0.3%), and damage to properties (0.3%), both from the central and the peripheral portions of the range. Using a grid-based zonal analysis to transform raw data density, we applied ordinary kriging and estimated a 4923 km2 main bear distribution, encompassing the historical stronghold of the bear population, and including a smaller (1460 km2) area of stable occupancy of reproducing female bears. National and Regional Parks cover 40.5% of the main bear distribution, plus an additional 18% encompassed by the Natura 2000 network alone. Despite some methodological and sampling problems related to spatial and temporal variation in sampling effort at the landscape scale, our approach provides an approximation of the current bear distribution that is suited to frequently update the distribution map. Future monitoring of this bear population would benefit from estimating detectability across a range on environmental and sampling variables, and from intensifying the collection of bear presence data in the peripheral portions of the distribution.

Bats represent a major component of forest biodiversity. In forest, bats find many roosting and foraging opportunities. When foraging in forest, different bat species exploit a range of microhabitats according to their echolocation and flight style. When roosting, bats require sufficient numbers of suitable tree cavities. Overall, forest structure may influence both foraging and roosting behaviour, and in turn the number of bat species present and their population size. The exploitation of forests for commercial purposes may be a threat to biodiversity when logging leads to habitat loss, alteration or fragmentation. While some bat species may benefit from an increase in the amount of edge habitat determined by logging, others, more specialized to exploit forest interiors, may be potentially harmed. In this study we set out to assess the effect on foraging bats of different management approaches, comparing locally applied traditional approaches with innovative multifunctional management options and delayed logging. Within the framework of the LIFE+ ManFor C.BD. Project we surveyed the effects of thinning at four Italian forest sites, each representing a separate case study. We found that in logged plots bat activity either showed no difference from unlogged plots or resulted in an increase in foraging activity, suggesting that thinning, at least in the forest types we dealt with, has no adverse consequences on bat foraging. However, in our case the effects varied greatly across sites and were detected mostly when all bat species were pooled together for analysis. We conclude that forest exploitation may be sustainable and even favour foraging bats, but since our work neither covered direct mortality linked with forestry operations nor roost loss, further studies are needed to analyze these important aspects. We also highlight that total bat activity revealed by acoustic surveys carried out with automatic recorders may be used as an appropriate indicator of forestry effects on bats. Download the complete issue.

In forest ecosystems amphibians often represent the greater portion of biomass of vertebrates. Salamanders in particular are invertebrates’ predators and, being ectotherm, they are capable to efficiently convert the major part of ingested biomass, making it available for the upper trophic levels. As a consequence, they play a key role in the nutrient and carbon cycles. Both completely terrestrial and semi-aquatic amphibians need suitable terrestrial shelters. Trees are a natural source of refuges for amphibians, that may found many shelters in the buttresses or in the ground holes formed by roots. The spectacled salamander Salamandrina perspicillata is an Italian endemism, with mainly terrestrial habits, for which we aim at investigating the selection of trees as shelters, based on tree features, using occupancy probability as a proxy of tree suitability. This research is developed within the project Life ManFor C.BD, and is aimed at finding a synthetic and quickly measurable index of tree suitability, capable to link forest management and biodiversity conservation. We investigated one hectare of beech forest in the “Montedimezzo-Pennataro” test site. For 385 trees we recorded stem diameter (DBH, starting from 10 cm), number of buttresses (BUT) and number of cavities that are created between stumps and soil in the vicinity of the buttresses loops (HOL) in order to detect if there was a relationship between such variables and the use of trees by salamanders. We conducted six surveys in the study site from October to November (2013), recording salamanders’ presence/pseudo-absence for each tree. Based on our results, occupancy models that allowed salamanders’ detection probability to vary among surveys have the best empirical support, in particular the model including all of the three site covariates (DBH, BUT and HOL). Naïve and estimated proportion of tree occupied are 0.44 and 0.71, respectively. Our research has focused over a relatively small area, investigating single tree features, in order to provide a good proxy of tree suitability by means of occupancy level. Ground level holes and buttresses seems to be essential in providing shelter sites for Salamandrina perspicillata. Since these features are correlated with DBH, a forest management option aiming at conjugating forest harvesting and salamander communities conservation may focus on the retention of those trees, having a larger DBH along with a large number of buttresses and cavities at the ground level.