0000000000375462
AUTHOR
Simone Costa
BiodiverCity: a first investigation on bird communities in two urban green areas of Palermo, Sicily
Since the 1980s, there has been a growing worldwide interest on urban bird diversity. The avifauna of Mediterranean cities has been however poorly investigated with standardized methods. Accordingly, our investigation aimed to record breeding and migrating species in two XVIII-century green areas of Palermo town: Villa Trabia (8 ha) and the Botanical Garden (10 ha). Starting from spring 2019, we carried 15 census sessions by point-counts, during the morning hours (10 points at Villa Trabia and 11 at the Botanical Garden, set with a minimum distance of 50 m) by recording, in each point, all the birds seen or heard within 10 min. Our preliminary results show that the study sites are mainly vi…
The European Pine Marten Martes martes (Linnaeus, 1758) Is Autochthonous in Sicily and Constitutes a Well-Characterised Major Phylogroup within the Species (Carnivora, Mustelidae)
No molecular data are currently available for the Sicilian populations of the European pine marten Martes martes, thus preventing any sound inference about its native or non-native status on the island, as well as the local phylogeography of the species. In order to investigate these issues, we sequenced two mtDNA markers in road-killed specimens collected in Sicily. Both markers consistently demonstrated the existence of a well-characterised Sicilian clade of the species, which is endemic to the island and constitutes the sister group of a clade including the Mediterranean and Central–North European major phylogroups of the European pine marten. Such evidence supports the autochthony of Ma…
New distributional data for the Mediterranean medicinal leech Hirudo verbana Carena, 1820 (Hirudinea, Hirudinidae) in Italy, with a note on its feeding on amphibians
Author(s): Marrone, Federico; Alfonso, Giuseppe; Barbagallo, Rosario; Brandmayr, Pietro; Bruni, Giacomo; Costa, Simone; Farina, Giovanni; Gerecke, Reinhard; Iannarelli, Angelina; Mazza, Giuseppe; Mazzei, Antonio; Menchetti, Mattia; Moretti, Valerio; Mori, Emiliano; Novaga, Riccardo; Pecoraro, Marco; Schifani, Enrico; Stoch, Fabio; Vecchioni, Luca | Abstract: Scarce data are currently available about the distribution of the Mediterranean medicinal leech Hirudo verbana in Italy, and most of the known occurrence localities are based on records collected in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, which were not confirmed in the last decades, mostly due to a lack of surveys. …