Since the 1970s, the crested porcupine has expanded his range into Northern regions in Italy, where it was historically absent, helped by climatic change, legal protection, and forest re-expansion. In the last ten years, a remarkable range expansion has also been observed in the southernmost Italian regions. The aim of our work is to summarize the distribution of this species in Southern Italy and assess potential range expansion under multiple future scenarios of global warming. We collected 1783 occurrence records of the crested porcupine through ad-hoc web pages, online platforms, and some data directly collected by authors (N = 976 occurrences between 1998 and 2008; N = 807 between 2008 and 2019). A remarkable increase in occurrences occurred in Lucania, Campania, and Apulia regions, in Southern Italy, mostly along the coastlines. Species distribution models showed that porcupine presence is associated with warm temperatures and an intermediate level of precipitation. Although land-cover showed lower importance compared to climate, the species was positively associated with forests and negatively associated with agricultural, grasslands and shrublands, and urban landscapes. Model projections suggested that future global warming can improve suitability for porcupines in the Apennine ridge, including the Southern Calabria and the Aspromonte National Park. However, increase in drought and urbanization may reduce the habitat suitability for the crested porcupine in the Salento peninsula, limiting the success of the range expansion by this large rodent, and in Eastern Calabria, wih possible range contractions along the Tyrrhenian coast.

We characterized the genetic structure of the Eurasian otter (Lutra lutra) meta-population living in the core of its Italian distribution range providing results from 191 fresh spraints, collected from 24 watercourses included in Southern Italy. Furthermore, according to ecological corridors and barriers, we discuss the likely ways of movement and possible evolutionary fate of these populations. We genotyped 136 samples using 11 Lut microsatellite nuclear markers amplified from faecal dna. Microsatellites were moderately variable (Ho = 0.45; He = 0.46), with a total number of alleles and average number of alleles per locus in the meta-population of 50 and 4.54, respectively. No significant heterozygosity excess was observed in meta-population suggesting no recent population bottlenecks. Bayesian clustering discriminated a sub-structuring of the meta-population in five putative clusters, indicating that local populations are genetically differentiated: three of these seem to be identifiable with geographically defined sub-populations (from the Cilento, Agri and Basento river basins). The fourth is represented by multiple sub-populations with admixed genotype, that include genotypes from the Lao, Sinni and Abatemaco river basins, living in a landscape with the higher environmental permeability. Landscape genetic analysis could provide evidence of an unexpected ecological corridor: the seacoast, highlighted, for the first time as a new way for the dispersion of the South-Italian otters. Deepening the knowledge of these perspectives is crucial to identify solid strategies aimed at the future health of the populations of the Italian otters, by restoring dispersal corridors and managing the watercourses.

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