Lorenzo Quaglietta
Post-Doc Researcher
I am broadly interested in animal ecology, behaviour and conservation, particularly of carnivores and aquatic and semiaquatic organisms (e.g. semiaquatic mammals, fish, crayfish), which I study using field (VHF/GPS telemetry, resource sampling, sign surveys, camera traps) and molecular techniques, and ecological modeling (e.g. mixed-effects models, geostatistical models applied to dendritic networks, home range/movement models).
I've obtained my PhD at the ‘La Sapienza’ University of Roma (Italy) in 2012, performing the field work in Alentejo (Portugal), in collaboration with Évora University. Since 2013, I'm a postdoctoral researcher at the CIBIO Applied Ecology Group led by PI Pedro Beja, investigating the ecology of otters, Pyrenean desmans and other semiaquatic species, and the effects of habitat fragmentation on river connectivity.
My present interests also include: (i) cascading effects of freshwater top predators (otter) and invasive species (focus on crayfish and American mink) on native, semiaquatic vertebrates (focus on desman), and, in turn, on macroinvertebrates and food webs; (ii) (trophic) interactions involving Iberian mammals; and (iii) movement ecology in freshwaters and heterogeneous landscapes.
I'm also particularly interested by methodological issues. For example, Miguel Porto and I developed a new R package (SiMRiv) for the analysis of telemetry data of organisms living in linear/dendritic environments (e.g. rivers), and I've been using a novel stream geostatistical modeling approach dealing with spatial autocorrelation in dendritic ecological networks to model the distribution of crayfish (Filipe et al. 2017) and Pyrenean desman (Quaglietta et al. 2018 - see publications).