Knowing how to coexist: a voyage of discovery on the movement of animals in an anthropized world

Wildlife is exposed to a variety of anthropogenic threats, either indirect, such as climate change, or direct, such as legal or illegal hunting, non-lethal disturbance from outdoor activities, habitat fragmentation or loss. These threats can have important effects on wildlife behavior, eventually affecting individual fitness, population dynam ics and species distribution. At the same time, changes in socio-economic habits (e.g. the abandonment of rural areas) combined with the protected status of some species (e.g. the wolf Canis lupus) can determine important changes in ecosystem function, offering the room for the restoration of important top-down population regula tory mechanisms (e.g., predation). In this complex context, the study of animal movement, namely movement ecology, combined with community ecology, is crucial to improve our understanding of the consequences of the above-mentioned threats and ecosystemic changes on wildlife behavior and occurrence. In this talk, I will first present some insights from global-scale multi-species and multi-population analyses that show the complexity of interactions between terrestrial mammals and human activities, and in particular how different species and populations can locally adapt their behavior to cope with human footprint. I will then narrow the focus of the talk to the Alpine context by investigating how space use behavior and activity patterns of mountain ungulates are affected by anthropogenic threats and the return of top predators, using different study systems. I will conclude by discussing how these findings, ensemble, can orient wildlife management and outdoor practitioners towards biodiversity values.