Carving a path across ‘g-local’ challenges: wildlife responses to human disturbance in the European ‘anthroscape’

Humans have occupied or affected with their activities all ecosystems across the planet. Climate change and the current plans to exponentially expand the road network, so increasing the continuum between areas occupied by humans and previously untouched habitats are dramatic threats that require deepening our understanding of how wildlife’s use of habitat and resources is impacted by humans. In Europe, animals move in a highly anthropic context, where habitat fragmentation and limited ecological connectivity combines with other sources of anthropic pressure, such as human pervasive presence and disturbance on the landscape, management practices, and the aforementioned global issues i.e. climate change. Yet, the shift in land use has gone both ways in the last decades, with some productive areas being abandoned first and successively re-occupied by forest, showing an opposite trend to what observed globally. In this talk, I analyse these components on several species (mainly ungulates and large carnivores), using a niche-based interpretation of the human-wildlife relationships, to disentangle some of the challenges and adaptations of European wildlife. I will conclude commenting on possible mitigating actions to limit human impact on the European mammal community in particular- possibly representing a benchmark of solutions in other global contexts