DOLOMITES - Annexes 2-8 - Provincia di Udine

FAUNA
NOMINATION OF THE DOLOMITES FOR INSCRIPTION ON THE WORLD NATURAL HERITAGE LIST UNESCO
98
Exploring local fauna
Exploration of the local fauna of the Dolomites, especially as regards invertebrate animal life, began
in the latter half of the 18th century at the hands of Austrian naturalists, among whom Laicharting
and Rosenhauer. An early contribution to the understanding of vertebrates was due to the Belluno
native Tomaso Antonio Catullo, professor of Natural History at the University of Padua, who published
Catalogo ragionato degli animali vertebrati permanenti o solo di passaggio nella provincia bellunese
in 1838. In the following decades, the fauna of the Dolomites began to attract the attention of other
Italian scholars, such as P. de Strobel, F. Ambrosi, A. Dogliosi, and S. Bertolini, but this area continued
to be toured with great interest by Austrian and German researchers, such as A. Stentz, who
collected interesting zoological materials on the Alpe di Siusi and on the Sciliar, and later, J. Mann,
F.F. Kohl and T. Becker, who have devoted their research respectively to lepidopters, hymenopters
and dipterans. In the second half of the 19th century, the biggest contribution to zoological studies
in the area in question was made by a cleric from the Alto Adige, Vincenz-Maria Gredler, whose
studies spanned from the vertebrates (reptiles and amphibians) to molluscs and insects (ants, beetles
and hemipteras). Subsequent investigations were centered on increasing attention on the ecological
aspects of the population, as well as the increasingly more extensive reconstructions of its origin. A
synthesis of the fauna of the Dolomites is therefore presented by G. Marcuzzi in 1956. Many brandnew
studies have been conducted in the past ten years which are still in the process of being condensed
into a new summary.
Wealth and uniqueness of the animal population
In the absence of a complete and up-to-date catalogue of the Dolomite fauna, extended to all the zoological
groups, to arrive at an estimate of the richness of the animal population of the area, we have
to make use of partial lists related to several groups (especially vertebrates and several orders of insects)
and lists of fauna related to individual, better-explored localities and more interesting zoological
groups. Generally speaking, Marcuzzi (1961) had estimated that there were at least 7,000 already
known animal species in the Dolomites, a number that has risen with the explorations conducted in
the last fifty years. We can argue that the actual population is closer to 10% of the entire non-marine
fauna population in Europe. A recent census (www.faunaeur.org) has brought that number to just
over 130,000 species. We should also note the very substantial specific legacy of animals, perhaps
less obvious than the vertebrates (especially birds and mammals), which often unduly draw the most
attention. Lepidopters (daytime and night-time butterflies) are found in the Dolomites and are represented
by at least 1,600 species. This significant wealth of fauna in the Dolomites is not due only
to the substantial diversity of the habitats and the multiplicity of the local plant life, which in turn
is due to the extremely wide difference in elevation that separates the valley floor from the highest
peaks and the variegated relationship that the area has had with man over the centuries, but also their
location in the vicinity of the Eastern hinge of the Alpine arc and the complexity of the paleogeographic
and paleoclimatic events which have involved and have led to the allocation, into more or
less expansive districts of the Dolomites, of endemic or sub-endemic species of animals, characterized
by a narrow distributional range which, in some cases, is entirely encircled by the Dolomites. At the
moment, the species or subspecies of endemic animals of the Dolomites has not been compiled into
a list, but there are certainly several dozen. In this regard, it is interesting to note that in the aforementioned
data base relating to the European fauna, 26 species and subspecies have been surveyed,
whose specific name includes the Dolomites (dolomitae, dolomitanus, etc.) or Cadore.