Phd in ENVIRONMENTAL AND EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY

Thesis title: Modeling habitat suitability accounting for forest structure and dynamics: Apennine brown bear as case study

Apennines brown bears (Ursus arctos marsicanus; Altobello 1921), isolated from the other European bear populations for at least 1500 years (Benazzo et al. 2017), are critically endangered and confined to a restricted range (Abruzzo-Lazio-Molise National Park, PNALM, and surrounding areas) in Italy. In light of the persistent small size of the Apennine brown bear population (Ciucci and Boitani 2008, Ciucci et al. 2015, Gervasi et al. 2017) and its high human-caused mortality rates reported during the past decades (Zunino and Herrero 1972, Boscagli 1987, Lorenzini et al. 2004), a renewed effort for conservation of this population is critically and urgently needed. Whereas previous habitat selection studies focused on predicting the potential species distribution to evaluate the effectiveness of the national and regional networks of protected areas (Posillico et al. 2004), and the detection of ecological traps (Falcucci et al. 2009) and structural connectivity linking the critical habitat patches at landscape scale (Maiorano et al. 2019), in this thesis I performed fine scale analysis to develop habitat management schemes that enhance the conservation of this unique brown bear population. Specifically, I investigated all those environmental and ecological drivers that can affect resource selection by bears, accounting for the hierarchical nature of resource selection (i.e., landscape, home range, and single forest patch scales), and the behavioral responses related to seasonal and circadian effects. Also, I investigated the impact of climate change and forest harvesting management, forecasting future forest species composition and tridimensional structure to quantify changes in habitat suitability for bears, in the next 100 years.