Ph. D. Student
Dipartimento di Biologia ed Evoluzione Organismi Marini
Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn
Villa Comunale
80121 Napoli - Italia
Tel.: +33 682 258159
E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Director of Studies: Dr. Francesca Raffini
Internal Supervisor: Dr. Fabio Crocetta
External Supervisor: Prof. Roger Kenneth Butlin
Program: PhD OU-SZN Program, XXVII cycle
Research Interests
I am interested in the evolutionary processes linked to anthropic activities. In the Anthropocene, climate change and human-mediated dispersal are rapidly redistributing species, creating novel communities and threatening global biodiversity. Yet the outcome of these range shifts remains notoriously difficult to forecast. Examples of established biological invasions have been thoroughly studied, but the lack of research on colonization failures - the most common outcome, creates a “survivorship bias” and a blindness to the causes and implications of failed introductions that can misguide conservation efforts of both threatened and invasive species.
My research at SZN focuses on the population decline towards extinction of introduced population of the marine snail Littorina saxatilis in the Venice lagoon, an otherwise very successful colonizer. Can we identify reliable evolutionary factors driving the fate of colonizations? I will address this question through multivariate analyses of genetic, behavioral, phenotypic and ecological data to track population dynamics through space and time and identify (dis)similarities between the Venice population and its source. By understanding why colonizations fail, we can build more predictive models and develop more effective conservation strategies to manage ecosystems in the Anthropocene.
