Abstract
The names given to places are a legacy of the past distribution of animal and plant species. The hypothesis tested in this work is that the density of toponyms can be used to predict the range of two large and charismatic species over time: the wolf and the brown bear in Italy. Kernel density maps of the toponyms were created and different thresholds of density were overlapped with the present and the historical ranges for both species. The density level maps were tested with the Kappa statistics against available historical ranges for both species. The pattern of the density in toponyms overlapped with the pattern of contraction and expansion reported in literature for both species over time. The minimum historical distributions of wolves and brown bears occurred at the highest densities of toponyms (95% isopleth value) and, overall, the various kernels thresholds showed an excellent agreement with the historical maps with an average Kappa of 0.84 ± 0.5.
Highlights
A toponym is the name given to a geographic place; it is a word of Greek origin from the combination of the terms tòpos ”place” and ònoma ”name”
This study focuses on two charismatic species, the brown bear and the wolf, not mistakable for other wildlife and for which historical distributions from field data are available in the Italian Peninsula
The aims of this work are to: 1) create maps of the place names linked to the Wolf (Canis lupus) -Lupo- in Italian and to the two subspecies of Brown bear -Orso- that occur in Italy, the European brown bear and the Marsican brown bear (Ursus arctos arctos and Ursus arctos marsicanus), the latter is an Italian endemism; 2) compare the distributions derived from the toponyms with present and past ranges of the two mammals; 3) explore the knowledge and the perception of those carnivores
Summary
A toponym is the name given to a geographic place; it is a word of Greek origin from the combination of the terms tòpos ”place” and ònoma ”name”. Toponyms with explicit reference to animal and plants were given according to what people used to see in their everyday life, names can be considered indicators of the former presence of certain species (Aybes and Yalden 1995; Boisseau and Yalden 1998; Gruezo 1999; Hough 2008). Plant common names used in toponyms depict the usage of the species as food, medicine, fabric or for other activities (Gruezo 1999; Fagúndez and Izco 2016). According to Fagúndez and Izco (2016), toponyms are: “stable, spatially-explicit elements that may be used as indicators of bio-cultural diversity”, revealing the socio-economic value given to Nature over time and should be considered an important part of cultural heritage. In Europe, research about place names has been used to track recent climate changes and perceptions of those changes (Sousa and García-Murillo 2001; Sweeney et al 2007; Sousa et al 2010)
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