Population dynamics, life history and conservation of mountain ungulates

I have had a scientific “love affair” with mountain ungulates since my time as an undergraduate student. Back in 1995 I had the chance to participate as a field assistant in a research expedition, led by Prof. Sandro Lovari (University of Siena, Italy) in the Kumbu Valley (Nepal) for a study on the behaviour of Himalayan tahr (Hemitragus jemlahicus). I then worked for my Master’s thesis on the territorial behaviour of Alpine chamois (Rupicapra rupicapra) leading to one of my very first peer-reviewed publications (von Hardenberg et al. 2000a). After spending a summer working in the field on incisor breath in bighorn sheep Ovis canadensis (von Hardenberg, Shipley and Festa-Bianchet, 2003) within the long term research project in Ram Mountain (Alberta, Canada) lead by Prof. Marco Festa-Bianchet (University of Sherbrooke), I finally started my PhD, under Marco’s supervision, on the population dynamics and life history of Alpine ibex (Capra ibex), participating thus from the very beginning in the long term research project on individually tagged Alpine ibex in the Levionaz Study area of the Gran Paradiso National Park, Together with Dr. Bruno Bassano (GPNP) I maintained this long term project in the subsequent years in my role as GPNP biologist and continue to be involved in it in the present day. Every summer researchers and students in Levionaz continue the tedious work of collecting data on the behaviour of tagged individuals, collecting feces for fecal counts of gastrointestinal parasite eggs and weighting them on remote scales in salt licks (Bassano et al. 2003). Our long term dataset on Alpine ibex, including horn measurements (an important secondary sexual trait in males) and total population counts (available for GPNP since 1956) allowed us to gain a better understanding of the links between individual genetic variability and life history traits (von Hardenberg et al. 2007, Brambilla et al. 2015), horn growth and senescence (von Hardenberg et al. 2004) and of the drivers of the dynamics of this population (von Hardenberg et al. 2000b, Jacobson et al. 2004, Pettorelli et al. 2007, Mignatti et al. 2012). Currently, together with Dr. Bruno Bassano and Alice Brambilla, a former PhD student on this project and current main collaborator, we are working on the effects of climate change on horn growth as well as on paternity estimation and the link between MHC genes and parasite resistance (in collaboration with the research group of Prof. Lukas Keller at the University of Zürich). In collaboration with Dr. Rachel McCrea (University of Kent, UK) I am instead working on an Integrated Population Model, integrating long term individual based data with population counts to disentangle the intrinsic and environmental drivers of changes in vital rates.