Italian Ringing Centre

The Italian Bird Ringing Centre is operated by the Istituto Superiore per la Protezione e la Ricerca Ambientale (ISPRA https://www.isprambiente.gov.it/it). Its activities started in 1929, when some traditional hunting sites (locally called ‘roccoli’ or ‘passate’) became ringing stations.

Since 1982, bird ringing in Italy has been completely disconnected from its hunting origins, abandoning the use of calls and lures and standardizing the use of mist-nets and other  capture methods.   Bird ringing courses and licensing exams were established to  enhance ringers’ education and standardized morphometric data collection was initiated. The bird ringing database is now fully computerized and open access. Currently, there are over 300 active licensed ringers in Italy.

Starting from 1976, some Italian ringing stations joined the Mettnau Project protocols and, based on a similar network approach as the MRI, the Small Islands Project (PPI) was launched in 1988. The PPI is the project that has contributed most to advance our understanding  of prenutial migration in Italy and  the western-central Mediterranean. Building on this experience, the Alps Project was launched in 1997 to monitor post-nuptial migration across the Italian Alps, with the participation of an impressive network of stations. Between 1997 and 2003, the Italian Bird Ringing Centre launched and coordinated the EURING Swallow project, with the enthusiastic participation of Italian ringers and those from other countries (25 countries involved, more than 1 million  swallows ringed) which collected data of great interest on the migration strategies of this iconic species. The Constant Effort Sites project (in Italy called PRISCO) has seen in its initial phases a limited participation, perhaps because of the strong interest in studying  migratory populations, but later, with the launch of the MonITRing Project (2015), over 100 stations joined the project and a good geographical and seasonal coverage of bird occurrence and demography in Italy has been achieved.

Another long tradition is ringing projects on chicks of colonial Charadriiformes that have allowed us to document the migration routes of the Italian populations and to define their wintering ranges.

The database of the Italian Ringing Centre contains data on over 7 million individual birds, increases by about 250,000 individuals per year and includes over 300 species. Of particular value are the first capture data, with morphometrics routinely collected on each new ringed bird since 1982. The oldest foreign recovery in the archive dates back to 1906. A summary of bird ringing in Italy is available in  ‘Atlante delle Migrazioni degli Uccelli italiani’ (The Italian Migration Atlas) published in 2008 (https://development.isprambiente.gov.it/it/pubblicazioni/pubblicazioni-di-pregio/atlante-della-migrazione-degli-uccelli-in-italia).

While the study of bird movements is still the main aim of the Italian Bird Ringing Centre, bird ringing data are also used  for monitoring population demography  and for the development of integrated population models. The study of the effects of environmental stressors and  the surveillance of bird mediated diseases such as avian influenza, West Nile disease and other arboviruses are now also major issues. The Italian Bird Ringing Centre contributes  specific indicators on bird abundance and species richness, as well as on the effects of climate change as monitored through long-term changes in the seasonality of migration, to the national annual report on environmental indicators. Many studies based on satellite telemetry are also carried out and supported by the ringing centre, which has greatly invested in this groundbreaking research area.