Daniela Gentile, Roberta Latini

Roughly 81 Apennine brown bears are alive today. To see how that number came about, this talk travels back 4,000 years to the completion of their isolation, then returns forwards through a century of conservation history in the Abruzzo, Lazio and Molise National Park: its founding in 1922, its dissolution and restoration, and the scientific era that followed. The genome tells a similarly double-edged story: what isolation took away, and what it unexpectedly left intact. The return journey ends in the present, with new challenges and old threats still open, and with tools sharper than they have ever been. The outcome is not yet written. (No DeLorean is provided.)

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