Investigation on avian haemosporidians among the Italian bird communities

Wildlife parasites are generally overlooked comparing most of their species to those relevant for humanhealth, farmed animals or cultivated plants. This is incoherent considering that parasites play a primaryrole in ecosystems. During the last decades, avian haemosporidians (Apicomplexa; Haemosporida), agroup of protistic blood parasites infecting bird species, has become one of the best known and mostused model-system in parasitological studies. The aim of the thesis is to provide a wide overlook on theoccurrence of avian haemosporidian through a neglected, but relevant, biogeographic area, i.e. Italyalong the Italian peninsula and its major islands. The purpose is primarily descriptive, as the absence ofhaemosporidian information for several zones and avian communities is a prominent limitation toachieve a global understanding. Secondly, possible determinants of haemosporidian occurrence andinfection probability were investigated both in rich avian communities and in peculiar species groupsdistinguished by unique eco-ethological traits. Chapter I focuses on avian haemosporidian of Sardinia,the second larger island into the Mediterranean basin and a biogeographic cluster for several endemictaxonomic entities. Chapter II reports a wide scale investigation on haemosporidian prevalence throughavian species breeding from Northern to Southern Italian Peninsula, including the near island of Sicily.This territory is placed into the Mediterranean biodiversity hotspot, and its southern portion acted asglacial biogeographic refugium for plant and animal populations. Chapter III and Chapter IV aims to verifythe occurrence of haemosporidian parasites in two target avian groups, the seabirds and the swifts,which are featured by singular life-history traits and are related to unusual ecological niches. Overall, thisthesis contributes to advance the general knowledge on avian haemosporidians and to increase theavailable data on these parasites.