Disney Science in Comics: Genetics and Evolution

Dr. Silvia Bencivelli

Piero Genovesi holds a PhD in animal ecology. Since May 2014, he has been the head of the Wildlife Advisory Service of the Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA). Since 2017, he has also served as the Head of the Area for Wildlife Management and Conservation at ISPRA. Piero Genovesi is the chair of the IUCN SSC Invasive Species Specialist Group, a Research Associate with Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, and an International Science Advisor for the Centre for Invasion Biology at Stellenbosch University, South Africa.

Piero Genovesi’s work spans several areas of conservation biology, including the ecology and conservation of carnivores, wildlife translocation, biodiversity monitoring, and invasive species. In the field of carnivore ecology, he supervised the reintroduction of brown bears to the Italian Alps and was responsible for coordinating the publication of national action plans for the conservation of wolves, brown bears, and otters, commissioned by the Italian Ministry of Environment. He is an active member of the International Association for Bear Research and Management, having served as Vice President for many years.

Regarding translocations, Piero Genovesi coordinated the establishment of national guidelines on animal translocations in 1996 and guidelines for the translocation of species of community interest in 2007. He was also part of the SSC task force that produced the IUCN Guidelines on Reintroductions and other Conservation Translocations, adopted by IUCN in 2012. From 2011 to 2014, he led the establishment of the national 3rd Report under Article 17 of the Habitat Directive, coordinating a group of 73 authors and over 100 experts. Piero Genovesi is notably active within the IUCN, serving on the Steering Committee of the Species Survival Commission since 2013 and previously on the Red List Committee.

His main area of activity is invasive species and related policy-making. He co-authored the European Strategy on Invasive Alien Species, adopted by the Council of Europe in 2003. Since then, he has published numerous papers on invasion patterns and responses to this threat in high-ranking journals, including Science, Nature, PNAS, PLoS, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environments, Conservation Biology, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, and Global Change Biology. In the realm of invasive species, Piero Genovesi maintains close collaborations with major international institutions such as the Convention on Biological Diversity, the European Union, the Bern Convention, the European Environment Agency, and the Convention on Migratory Species. He is a member of the Liaison Group on Invasive Alien Species of the Convention on Biological Diversity, which comprises key international standard-setting organizations. More recently, he is a founding member of the Steering Committee of the Global Invasive Alien Species Information Partnership (GIASIP), launched by the Convention on Biological Diversity.

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