EDITORIAL Wildl. Biol. Pract., 2013 September 9(3): i-iii doi:10.2461/wbp.2013.ibeun.0 Copyright © 2013 E. Serrano, J.M. López-Martín, C. Rosell & C. Fonseca. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distri- bution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Published by: Portuguese Wildlife Society. Ungulate Biology, Health and Management in the 21 st century: the Tables are Turned in the Iberian Peninsula E. Serrano 1, 2 , J.M. López-Martín 1, 3 , C. Rosell 4,5 & C. Fonseca 6, 7 1 Servei d’Ecopatologia de Fauna Salvatge en Facultat de Veterinária, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Bellaterra, Spain. 2 Estadística i Investigació Operativa, Departament de Matemàtica, Universitat de Lleida, Lleida, Spain. 3 Àrea d’Activitats Cinegètiques. D. Gral del Medi Natural i Biodiversitat, Generalitat de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain. 4 MINUARTIA, Sant Celoni, Barcelona, Spain. 5 Departament de Biologia Animal, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain. 6 Departamento de Biologia & CESAM, Universidade de Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal. 7 Universidade Lúrio, Nampula, Mozambique. * Corresponding authors e-mail: E. Serrano, emmanuel.serrano@uab.cat; J.M. López-Martín, josep. lopez@gencat.cat; C. Rosell, crosell@minuartia.com; C. Fonseca, cfonseca@ua.pt. Long time ago, observing ungulates in the Iberian Peninsula (IP) was a privilege for few lucky people. In those days Iberian ibexes, chamois, roe deer or red deer populations were moderately abundant in some game units or present in remote areas of IP. However, currently, ungulate populations in the IP are mostly a conservation success story, as their numbers and distribution range have increased substantially over most of our territory. This extraordinary population increase has created new challenges for hunters, wildlife ecologists, veterinarians and managers. Actually, not only wild boars are now easy to sight in some cities of the IP but are responsible for certain insecurity for local residents, specially due to road traffc accidents. Today, roe deer and Iberian ibexes have signifcantly increased their distribution and it’s possible to see ibexes near to the shoreline and roe deer groups colonizing semi- arid and dry Mediterranean habitats. Surprisingly, the Iberian ibex is absent in some regions of the Iberian range (e.g., centre and south Portugal, or in the Pyrenees) which have triggered an intense debate between managers and researchers about the suitability for a further reintroduction. Little is known, on the other hand, about the current status of old adopted species, such as the aoudad, and we know very little about the status of groups of pot-bellied pigs and feral goats in our countries. The impact of diseases on these species and on human beings (in case of shared diseases and zoonosis) becomes, now more than ever, a very important issue because of the abundance of Iberian ungulate populations.