Biogeographia – The Journal of Integrative Biogeography

The author has carried out a bibliographic survey of the status of breeding forest birds in Italy over 15 decades (1872-2022) in order to establish an objective long-term trend (stable, increasing, decreasing, etc.). The number of breeding forest birds in Italy amounts to 61; their distribution, with a few exceptions, indicates that they are widespread in Eurasia, but only a small percentage of Eurasian forest species have colonized Italy and the other Mediterranean peninsulas, namely 49 in Iberian, 61 in Italian and 64 in Balkan peninsulas; a small percentage of them (between 15.6 and 19.7%) belongs to trans-Saharan migrants, and between 31.2 and 40.8% increases their populations in winter. The similarity between the forest species on the three peninsulas (Iberian, Italian, and Balkan) results between 0.45 and 0.48, indicating a certain difference in the overall avifauna in the three territories. Not all species have penetrated southwards into the three peninsulas; for example, some that stopped in the Italian Alps have instead arrived in the forests of Greece, at a latitude corresponding to southern Italy, or species that in Italy stopped in the northern Apennines in the other two peninsulas have instead arrived far south. Iberian peninsula and the island of Corsica hold three endemic species among breeding forest birds, Italian and Balkan peninsulas have no endemic species. A tentative reconstruction of the climatic vicissitudes of the Mediterranean has been made to explain why only broadly distributed Eurasian forest species have penetrated the Mediterranean peninsulas. Overall, the Mediterranean presently hosts mainly neo-endemic taxa among forest bird species; the only paleo-endemics can be considered the three species of nuthatches living in Corsica, Algeria, and Turkey (other than Caucasus and the islet of Lesvos) and Le Vaillant’s woodpecker in the Maghreb (North Africa). Italian forests presently cover ca. 40% of the land surface, increasing since 1980’, but 22% of woodland is not of natural origin (3.3% due to afforestation). However, it is difficult to know the true increase of forests, because some of them are fired every year. The presence of some ecologically demanding forest birds depends on the age of the trees, permanent open spaces and other characteristics at the edge of woodland.