Soil biodiversity is fundamental for ecosystems, ensuring many ecosystem functions, such as nutrient cycling, organic matter decomposition, soil formation, and organic carbon pool increase. Due to these roles, there is a need to study and completely understand how soil biodiversity is composed through different habitats. The aim of this study was to describe the edaphic soil community of the alpine environments belonging to the Gran Paradiso National Park, thus detecting if there are any correlation with environmental features. We studied soil fauna through environmental DNA metabarcoding. From eDNA metabarcoding, 18 families of arthropods were successfully detected, and their abundance expressed in terms of the relative frequency of sequences. Soil faunal communities of mixed coniferous forests were characterized by Isotomidae, Entomobriydae, Hypogastruridae, and Onychiuridae; while mixed deciduous forests were composed mostly by Isotomidae, Cicadidae, Culicidae, and Neelidae. Calcicolous and acidic grasslands also presented families that were not detected in forest habitats, in particular Scarabaeidae, Curculionidae, Brachyceridae, and had in general a more differentiated soil community. Results of the Canonical Component Analysis revealed that the main environmental features affecting soil community for forests were related to vegetation (mixed deciduous forests, tree basal area, tree biomass, Shannon index), soil (organic layers and organic carbon stock), and site (altitude); while for prairies, soil pH and slope were also significant in explaining soil community composition. This study provided a description of the soil fauna of alpine habitats and resulted in a description of community composition per habitat and the relation with the characteristic of vegetation, soil, and topographic features of the study area. Further studies are needed to clarify ecological roles and needs of these families and their role in ecosystem functioning.

Protected areas play an important role due to their twofold capacity for biodiversity conservation and the provision of many benefits to human well-being. Tourism can be a tool for protecting nature, enhancing people’s sensitivity, and a threat to biodiversity management. This study investigates users’ attitudes and perceptions and managers’ concerns related to the frequentation of two protected areas in the Italian Alps: the Gran Paradiso National Park and the Adamello Regional Park. We carried out 32 semi-structured interviews with park managers and municipalities to identify their perception of tourism and possible threats related to the use of the parks. Thus, we administered questionnaires to 3399 users of the PAs to investigate their attitudes and perceptions. We made considerations on whether there were similarities in the attitudes identified by the park managers and results of the questionnaires. Questionnaires confirmed the managers’ perception of mass tourism regarding one-day stays and the purpose of the visits, but we could not exhaustively confirm the increase of new visitors. We performed a binary logistic regression to understand the relationship between short-term stays and attitudes of visitors (origin, frequency of visits, stakeholders’ category, and biographical data). Eventually, interviews stated an exacerbation of the growth of visitors due to the COVID-19 pandemic; thus, we investigated if the pandemic changed the assiduity of visits, and half of the users claimed a change in their assiduity of visits, but mostly declared a decreased frequentation of the area.