Alfredo Ascanio

Miami University | MU · Biology

Ecological niche differentiation is a process that accompanies lineage diversification and community assembly. Traditionally, the degree of niche differentiation is estimated by contrasting niche hypervolumes of two taxa, reconstructed using ecologically relevant variables. These methods disregard the fact that niches can shift in different ways an...

Understanding the dynamics of coral recruitment and post-settlement is fundamental to a better comprehension of coral reef dynamics and recovery. We studied the abundance and survivorship of coral recruits and juveniles together with benthic dynamics at a scale of months and centimeters in Playa Mero reef, a disturbed reef in Morrocoy National Park...

The opposing forces of gene flow and isolation are two major processes shaping genetic diversity. Understanding how these vary across space and time is necessary to identify the environmental features that promote diversification. The detection of considerable geographic structure in taxa from the arid Nearctic has prompted research into the driver...

The chemical composition and stoichiometry of vertebrate bodies changes greatly during ontogeny as phosphorus‐rich bones form, but we know little about the variation among species during early development. Such variation is important because element ratios in animal bodies influence which element limits growth and how animals contribute to nutrient...

Hybridization facilitates recombination between divergent genetic lineages and can be shaped by both neutral and selective processes. Upon hybridization, loci with no net fitness effects introgress randomly from parental species into the genomes of hybrid individuals. Conversely, alleles from one parental species at some loci may provide a selectiv...

The Smooth Greensnake (Opheodrys vernalis) ranges from the glaciated regions of Northeastern United States and Canada down to scattered populations in Northern Mexico, Southern Texas, and Eastern Utah. In Ohio, the Smooth Greensnake is somewhat continuously distributed only within the very Northeastern part of the state, but outside of this region...

Hybridization can have a profound negative effect on population fitness when species exhibit divergence in adaptive traits. The Streamside salamander, Ambystoma barbouri, and the Smallmouth salamander, A. texanum, are closely related species differentiated primarily by breeding habitat and reproduction-related traits, but previous work suggests pat...

Background The increasing number of chromosome-level genome assemblies has advanced our knowledge and understanding of macroevolutionary processes. Here, we introduce the genome of the desert horned lizard, Phrynosoma platyrhinos, an iguanid lizard occupying extreme desert conditions of the American southwest. We conduct analysis of the chromosomal...

This dataset contains 2850 photographs of the seafloor in coral communities from Venezuela that were taken during 2017 and 2018. We used a hierarchical experimental design with four random factors representing four different spatial scales: (1) region (hundreds of kilometers), (2) localities (tens of kilometers), (2) reef sites (hundreds of meters)...

Estimating variability across spatial scales has been a major issue in ecology because the description of patterns in space is extremely valuable to propose specific hypotheses to unveil key processes behind these patterns. This paper aims to estimate the variability of the coral assemblage structure at different spatial scales in order to determin...

The characteristics of coral reef sampling and monitoring are highly variable, with numbers of units and sampling effort varying from one study to another. Numerous works have been carried out to determine an appropriate effect size through statistical power; however, these were always from a univariate perspective. In this work, we used the pseudo...

Esta es la presentación para la charla denominada:"La historia de Playa Mero: Uso de modelos tridimensionales del bentos para estudiar las dinámicas ecológicas de corales juveniles en un arrecife perturbado.", presentada en el XII Congreso Venezolano de Ecología el 20 de noviembre de 2020. Esta presentación muestra algunos resultados de mi tesis de...

The characteristics of coral reef sampling and monitoring are highly variable, with numbers of units and sampling effort varying from one study to another. Numerous works have been carried out to determine an appropriate effect size through statistical power, however, always from a univariate perspective. In this work, we aimed to assess the pseudo...

Coral disease research encompasses five decades of undeniable progress. Since the first descriptions of anomalous signs, we have come to understand multiple processes and environmental drivers that interact with coral pathologies. In order to gain a better insight into the knowledge we already have, we explored how key topics in coral disease resea...

Young coral ecological dynamics are fundamental to understand the recovery process of damaged reefs. In Venezuela there is a natural laboratory in Morrocoy National Park. Playa Mero reef coral cover declined from 40% to less than 5% after a massive dead event. Two decades after we asked why if there are young corals, they haven't been able to stabl...

The implantation and development of new methods aimed to assess the health status of coral reefs is a tenet core for the conservation science of these systems. For years, coral reefs communities have been described in Venezuela; however, no efforts to classify the health status of these systems have been accomplished. Part of the problem is that re...

Coral disease research encompasses five decades of undeniable progress. Since the first descriptions of anomalous signs, we have come to understand multiple processes and environmental drivers that interact with coral pathologies. In order to gain a better insight into the knowledge we already have, we explored how key topics in coral disease resea...

Este servicio web de mapas tiene como objetivo poner a disposición de tomadores de decisiones, empresas, funcionarios y los ciudadanos, la información generada para la priorización de las áreas de conservación en la Faja del Orinoco. Nuestra meta es que sea colaborativo, para contar con datos externos que permitan mejorar los modelos y el conocimi...