Mario Melletti is an independent researcher. For more than a decade he has been studying the ecology and behaviour of the forest buffalo, spending more than two years in a remote area in the Dzanga-Ndoki National Park, in the Central African Republic. He has obtained a PhD in animal ecology from the University of Rome in collaboration with the Department of Conservation Biology of Seville. He has collaborated on several projects and surveys on both mammals and birds. He is also a reviewer of many peer reviewed international journals.