MEDRAPTORS - Key Persons
He study evolutionary biology, ecology and behaviour of birds (mainly raptors) and the integration of some aspects of basic research with applications in conservation biology and wildlife management around the Mediterranean basin. Furthermore, by addressing important issues in wetlands conservation with the tools of international networking, he is involved in the promotion of environmental protection and conservation of such habitats, especially in the Mediterranean region.
Pioneer in bird tracking studies, he is promoter of urban raptor research in Italy and he studied bird ecology and movements in a large part of the world continents. President of Ornis italica association, is recently leading different activities in close collaboration with MEDRAPTORS such as the project Strait of Messina Bird Observatory and the radar research.
Gianpasquale is a PhD in Experimental Ecology and Geobotany at Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences of the University of Pavia, where carries out ecological researches on birds and mammals. He is a member of MEDRAPTORS since 2005 when he participated at a migration project in Calabria (southern Italy). He was involved in other researches, such as the migration project at Antikythera in Greece and the Strait of Messina Bird Observatory. He helps MEDRAPTORS to analyse data and to write papers.
Peppe Lucia got his M.Sc. from the University of Pavia, and has been
performing field studies on raptor migration since 2005, especially in
Southern Italy and in Greece. He also studied the short-toed eagle
migration by means of satellite tracking, tagging individuals in the
region of Basilicata. In the same region, he is also carrying out a
long term raptors winter census through road transects.
She is currently a PhD student in movement and computational ecology interested in how, and to what extent, the environment affects the movement patterns of different species. Understanding this relationship allows us, as a scientific community, to predict their movements in different environmental scenarios, both current and future, taking into account potential conservation applications. She mainly works with analysis and visualization of available movement data (collected through observations, radar, gps or accelerometers) in relation to publicly available environmental data. Her current focus is on large soaring birds, due to their large-scale movements and their strict dependence on the support of uplifts to move across the landscape.
Michele Panuccio achieved a Ph.D. studying raptor migration in the Mediterranean basin. He studied raptor movements using different methodologies: visual observations, ringing recoveries, radar and GPS tracking. He is also involved in raptor ecology research at breeding and wintering sites. He made his research both as post-doctoral researcher at the University of Pavia and as member of MEDRAPTORS and Ornis italica. He has been a post-doctoral researcher on waterbird movements in ISPRA - Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research. Founder member of MEDRAPTORS and coordinator of its research activities in the last ten years. Michele sadly passed away in June 2019.
Nicolantonio Agostini is the President of Medraptors. He graduated at the University of Parma in Natural Science and achieved his Ph.D. in Experimental Ecology at the University of Pavia. Founder member of MEDRAPTORS, since 1989 he has been studying raptor migration in Italy, Tunisia, Malta, and more recently also in Greece, Turkey and Georgia. He was active between 1984 and 1996 in protectionist activities against poaching at the Strait of Messina together with LIPU-Birdlife Italy. He is author of more than 100 ornithological papers.
Ugo Mellone is the vice-president of Medraptors. He has been working on raptor migration since the 2003, being among the founders of MEDRAPTORS. He has been studying several species, for example Eleonora's falcon and short-toed eagle, by means of satellite telemetry. He got a PhD on movement ecology of migrating raptors and now he works mainly as a conservation photojournalist.
As a biologist he worked on several different topics and of raptor ecology in particular. His main interest is related to the ecology and conservation of Black kites. For this reason he is responsible of a long-term monitoring project of a population breeding in a sub-urban area of central Italy. He studied also the behaviour of Black kites and their use of rubbish dumps as a feeding source.