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Porcupines in Italian islands: update on the distribution of Hystrix cristata in Sardinia

  • Giuliano Milana ORCID logo , Andrea Viviano ORCID logo and Emiliano Mori ORCID logo EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: November 21, 2022
Mammalia
From the journal Mammalia Volume 87 Issue 2

Abstract

In the last few decades, the crested porcupine (Hystrix cristata L., 1758) showed a remarkable range expansion in Italy, due to legal protection, climatic change and antropochorous releases. Particularly, porcupines have been released also in Sardinia, with first records of this large rodent in the wild dating back to 2005. Historical and social factors related to the progressive urbanization and the consequent abandonment of the traditional land use in mountain landscapes probably helped the re-expansion of forest, uncultivated fields and of animal’s species associated with these habitats. In Sardinia, a population establishment and a subsequent expansion of the area of distribution can be predicted as large portions of the island are highly suitable for the crested porcupine. Therefore, this recently introduced population should be removed to limit potential ecological and social conflicts.

Keywords: crested porcupine; range expansion; Rodentia; Sardinia; wildlife management
Corresponding author: Emiliano Mori, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Istituto di Ricerca sugli Ecosistemi Terrestri, Via Madonna del Piano 10, 50019, Sesto Fiorentino (Florence), Italy, E-mail:

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank Raffaele Deiana, Gianmario Mou, Roberto Piroddi and Gianni Usai for providing useful data for our work. The Associate Editor Dr. Boris Kryštufek and two anonymous reviewers kindly improved our MS with their comments.

  1. Author contributions: All authors planned and supervised the study. G.M. and A.V. collected occurrences. E.M. wrote the very first draft. All authors participated in writing up all drafts.

  2. Research funding: None declared.

  3. Research ethics: All procedures performed in this study did not involve animal handling and were in accordance with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments.

  4. Conflict of interest statement: The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest regarding this article.

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Supplementary Material

The online version of this article offers supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/mammalia-2022-0111).

Received: 2022-09-28
Accepted: 2022-11-08
Published Online: 2022-11-21
Published in Print: 2023-03-28

© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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https://doi.org/10.1515/mammalia-2022-0111
Keywords for this article
crested porcupine; range expansion; Rodentia; Sardinia; wildlife management

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Conservation
  3. Giant pangolin and white-bellied pangolin observations from a World Heritage site
  4. Ecology
  5. Spatiotemporal overlap between Siberian roe deer (Capreolus pygargus tianschanicus) and sympatric mammalian species on Jeju Island, South Korea
  6. A comparison of summer insectivory among four sympatric mesocarnivores on Izushima, a small island in northern Japan
  7. Feeding ecology of Massoutiera mzabi (Rodentia, Ctenodactylidae) in two national parks of Central Sahara
  8. Change in the composition of cave-dwelling bats after a 53-year interval at the Gruta do Limoeiro (Espírito Santo, Brazil)
  9. The big brown bat (Eptesicus fuscus) reduces its body mass during winter in a tropical montane ecosystem of central Mexico
  10. Natural history of the fishing bat Noctilio leporinus (Chiroptera: Noctilionidae) in the Gulf of Mexico
  11. Biogeography
  12. First camera-trap evidence of banded civet Hemigalus derbyanus (Mammalia: Carnivora: Viverridae) in Myanmar
  13. Porcupines in Italian islands: update on the distribution of Hystrix cristata in Sardinia
  14. Ethology
  15. Associative colour learning and discrimination in the South African Cape rock sengi Elephantulus edwardii (Macroscelidea, Afrotheria, Mammalia)
  16. Taxonomy/Phylogeny
  17. A new species of jupati, genus Metachirus Burmeister 1854 (Didelphimorphia, Didelphidae) for the Brazilian Amazon
  18. The prevalence of vestigial teeth in two beaked whale species from the North Atlantic
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