During historical times many local grey wolf (Canis lupus) populations underwent a substantial reduction of their sizes or became extinct. Among these, the wolf population once living in Sicily, the biggest island of the Mediterranean Sea, was completely eradicated by human persecution in the early decades of the XX century. In order to understand the genetic identity of the Sicilian wolf, we applied ancient DNA techniques to analyse the mitochondrial DNA of six specimens actually stored in Italian museums. We successfully amplified a diagnostic mtDNA fragment of the control region (CR) in four of the samples. Results showed that two samples shared the same haplotype, that differed by two substitutions from the currently most diffused Italian wolf haplotype (W14) and one substitution from the only other Italian haplotype (W16). The third sample showed a wolf-like haplotype never described before and the fourth a haplotype commonly found in dogs. Furthermore, all the wolf haplotypes detected in this study belonged to the mitochondrial haplogroup that includes haplotypes detected in all the known European Pleistocene wolves and in several modern southern European populations. Unfortunately, this endemic island population, bearing unique mtDNA variability, was definitively lost before it was possible to understand its taxonomic uniqueness and conservational value.

An application of the FHyL (field spectral libraries, airborne hyperspectral images and topographic LiDAR) method is presented. It is aimed to map and classify bedforms in submerged beach systems and has been applied to Sabaudia coast (Tirrenyan Sea, Central Italy). The FHyl method allows the integration of geomorphological observations into detailed maps by the multisensory data fusion process from hyperspectral, LiDAR, and in-situ radiometric data. The analysis of the sandy beach classification provides an identification of the variable bedforms by using LiDAR bathymetric Digital Surface Model (DSM) and Bathymetric Position Index (BPI) along the coastal stretch. The nearshore sand bars classification and analysis of the bed form parameters (e.g., depth, slope and convexity/concavity properties) provide excellent results in very shallow waters zones. Thanks to well-established LiDAR and spectroscopic techniques developed under the FHyL approach, remote sensing has the potential to deliver significant quantitative products in coastal areas. The developed method has become the standard for the systematic definition of the operational coastal airborne dataset that must be provided by coastal operational services as input to national downstream services. The methodology is also driving the harmonization procedure of coastal morphological dataset definition at the national scale and results have been used by the authorities to adopt a novel beach management technique.

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The Sicilian wolf represented the only population of wolves living on a Mediterranean island until the first half of the twentieth century (1930s-1960s). Previous studies hypothesised that they remained isolated from mainland wolves from the end of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), until human persecutions led them to extinction. There are only seven known Sicilian wolf specimens from the 19th and 20th century preserved in museums in Italy and recent morphometric analyses assigned them to the new subspecies Canis lupus cristaldii 10. To better understand the origins of the Sicilian wolf, and its relationship to other wolf populations, we sequenced four whole genomes (3.8x-11.6x) and five mitogenomes. We investigated the relationship between Sicilian wolves and other modern breeds to identify potential admixture. Furthermore, considering that the last land-bridge between Sicily and Italy disappeared after the LGM, around 17 kya, we explored the possibility that the Sicilian wolf retained ancestry from ancient wolf and dog lineages. Additionally, we explored whether the long-term isolation might have affected the genomic diversity, inbreeding levels and genetic load of the Sicilian wolf. Our findings show that the Sicilian wolves shared most ancestry with the modern Italian wolf population but are better modelled as admixed with European dog breeds, and shared traces of Eneolithic and Bronze age European dogs. We also find signatures of severe inbreeding and low genomic diversity at population and individual levels due to long-term isolation and drift, suggesting also low effective population size.

During historical times many local populations of grey wolf (Canis lupus), once the most diffused mammal in the world, became extinct. Among these the Sicilian population, the biggest island of the Mediterranean Sea, was eradicated by human persecution in the early decades of the XX century.In order to reconstruct the genetic identity of the Sicilian wolf, we used ancient DNA techniques to analyse the mitochondrial DNA of the six known specimens actually stored in museums.We have successfully extracted and amplified a mtDNA fragment of the control region (CR) from four samples. Our analyses show that two samples have the same haplotype, that differs by two substitutions from the most diffused Italian haplotype (W14) and one substitution from the second Italian rare haplotype (W16). One of the others two samples shows a new wolf haplotype never described before and the fourth a haplotype common in dogs.Furthermore, all the detected wolf haplotypes in this study belonged to the mitochondrial haplogroup to which the Pleistocene European wolves and several current southern Europe haplotypes belong.Unfortunately, this endemic population of Mediterranean wolf, was definitively lost before it has been possible to understand its uniqueness and importance regards conservation.