0000000000248266
AUTHOR
Fabio Lo Valvo
The first inventory of birds of prey in sicilian museum collections (Italy)
Natural History Museums are places of scientific dissemination and informal education, and have a fundamental role in scientific research and in preserving the historical heritage of a territory and its biodiversity. The island of Sicily, thanks to its geographic position as an inter-continental bridge in the Mediterranean, presents a notable ornithological diversity, with both sedentary species and species that migrate between Africa and Europe. For this reason, and thanks to a strong hunting tradition, Sicilian collections also depict the avifaunal assemblage historically present in the region, particularly for birds of prey, the group we focus on because of its particular ecological char…
Adaptive plasticity of blue tits(Parus caeruleus)and great tits(Parus major)breeding in natural and semi‐natural insular habitats
The breeding performance and foraging of blue and great tits, and the abundance of arthropods living on the trees of an oak-wood and of a coniferous reafforestation were studied in Sicily, in order to: 1) compare breeding parameters in natural and semi-natural habitats within the same area; 2) estimate the degree of overlap in peak resource and peak demand of young tits, and the overlap of nestling diet of the two species in the two habitats. Both species had earlier laying dates, laid more eggs and raised more fledglings in the oakwood than in the reafforestation; they achieved the same fledging success within the same habitat type. These differences are probably due to the earlier and hig…
Contrasting age-specific recruitment and survival at different spatial scales: A case study with the European storm petrel
Evolutionary studies on optimal decisions or conservation guidelines are often derived by generalising patterns from a single population, while inter-population variability in life-history traits is seldom considered. We investigated here how survival and recruitment probabilities changed with age at different geographical scales using the encounter histories of 5523 European storm petrels from three Mediterranean colonies, and also how our estimates of these parameters might be expected to affect population growth rates using population matrix models. We recorded similar patterns among colonies, but also important biological differences. Local survival, recruitment and breeding success inc…