Abstract
In the interwar years the Gran Paradiso ibex population followed two subsequent, contrasting trends: a steady rise once the national park was established in 1922, followed by a precipitous fall after the Fascist regime took direct control of conservation in 1934, which almost led to the colony’s extinction. This paper addresses the issue of how models taken from population ecology may inform historical narratives. The data for the interwar years were analyzed using a statistical model based on climate and population density, which has proved reliable for most of the post-World War II period. The article highlights the pivotal role of anthropic variables in determining the inter-war trends and how these are best analyzed using historical scholarship.
Highlights
Mathematical and statistical modeling has become a pivotal feature of population ecology in the decades since the field came to prominence in the 1920s through seminal work by people such as Vito Volterra and Alfred J
Having initially been developed by scientists from disciplines outside ecology, mathematical representations of population trends had acquired a small but firm foothold in the field by the 1940s, and computer simulations became an essential tool in population dynamics from the 1960s onwards
In this paper I have combined tools taken from recent developments in population biology and traditional historical methods to analyze animal population trends in Italy’s Gran Paradiso National Park during the interwar years
Summary
Mathematical and statistical modeling has become a pivotal feature of population ecology in the decades since the field came to prominence in the 1920s through seminal work by people such as Vito Volterra and Alfred J. I first present the original model (Jacobson et al 2004), which has proven pretty reliable at predicting ibex dynamics in the Gran Paradiso National Park for the 1956–2000 period, using exclusively population and weather data.
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