Marie Curie Actions: Inspiring Researchers - Imdea

Birds of prey flyinghighDr Paola Movalli Duke realised early on that as biodiversity lossintensifi es, so does the need to forecast ecosystem change.She knew too that raptors – also known as birds of prey –provide a window on the overall functioning of the environment.And she wanted to show how rare sedentary raptors, suchas the lanner falcon in Sicily, Italy, can serve as sentinels ofenvironmental health, contamination and ecosystem change.The lanner, too, might benefi t from Dr Movalli Duke’s idea thatimproved knowledge of threats could hatch recovery plansfor the species.‘Species that function as sentinels of change can be criticalmonitors and predictors of successful climate-changemitigation and adaptation. Raptors are particularly suitableas sentinels. They are widespread, particularly sensitive toenvironmental change at various scales, and are amongthe fi rst organisms to exhibit readily observable responses,’she says.Dr Movalli Duke’s Marie Curie Fellowship aimed at understandingchemical and other pressures on lanners and was based atthe Natural Environment Research Council’s (NERC) Centrefor Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) at Monks Wood in theUnited Kingdom. The two-year fellowship saw her carry outfi eld sampling in Sicily in collaboration with the University ofPalermo (UNIPA) and laboratory analyses at Monks Wood. Shealso created an interdisciplinary network of raptor ecologistsand ecotoxicologists across Europe.Sampling on cliff topsDr Movalli Duke’s fi eld research focused on collecting samplesof blood and feathers from lanner chicks and two of its preyspecies – magpies and doves. This was not as easy as it maysound. ‘Sampling lanner chicks is particularly diffi cult,’ she says.‘The nest sites are very sparsely distributed over thousands ofsquare kilometres in Sicily’s remote uplands, and built on highcliffs. Also, special care must be taken with such a rare speciesto avoid any risk of causing reproduction to fail.’ Her solutionwas to ask the Department of Animal Biology at UNIPA to helpprovide a team of ornithologists familiar with lanner territoriesA view of the Zingaro Nature Reserve (Riserva Naturale Orientata dello Zingaro) and Tyrrhenian Sea, north-west Sicily, location of the workshopon the development of an EU Raptor Monitoring Network© Paola Movalli Duke 200641