Amparo Lázaro

• PhD
• Tenured Scientist at Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies (IMEDEA CSIC)

Motivation: The accelerated and widespread conversion of once continuous ecosystems into fragmented landscapes has driven ecological research to understand the response of biodiversity to local (fragment size) and landscape (forest cover and fragmentation) changes. This information has important theoretical and applied implications, but is still fa...

Motivation: The accelerated and widespread conversion of once continuous ecosystems into fragmented landscapes has driven ecological research to understand the response of biodiversity to local (fragment size) and landscape (forest cover and fragmentation) changes. This information has important theoretical and applied implications, but is still fa...

Motivation The accelerated and widespread conversion of once continuous ecosystems into fragmented landscapes has driven ecological research to understand the response of biodiversity to local (fragment size) and landscape (forest cover and fragmentation) changes. This information has important theoretical and applied implications, but is still far...

Worldwide pollinator declines are a major problem for agricultural production. However, understanding how landscape characteristics and local management influence crop production through its pollinators is still a challenge. The carob tree (Ceratonia siliqua) is a pollinator-dependent Mediterranean crop of high economic importance in food and pharm...

Motivation Pollinators play a crucial role in maintaining Earth's terrestrial biodiversity. However, rapid human‐induced environmental changes are compromising the long‐term persistence of plant‐pollinator interactions. Unfortunately, we lack robust, generalisable data capturing how plant‐pollinator communities are structured across space and time....

The transformation of natural landscapes for agricultural purposes may severely affect wild bee and wasp reproduction. In this study, we located trap‐nests on 18 natural Mediterranean communities within agricultural areas to study the effects of landscape (% natural areas and heterogeneity) and local flowering communities (flower abundance and rich...

Natural habitat loss is a major threat to biodiversity worldwide. This is particularly pronounced in insular ecosystems, which are often biodiversity hotspots and home to a multitude of endemic species. However, few studies have analyzed how the complete reproductive cycle of plants, from flowering to seedling survival, is affected by habitat loss...

Worldwide pollinator declines are a major problem for agricultural production. However, understanding how landscape characteristics and local management influence crop production through its pollinators is still a challenge. By sampling 20 orchards in Mallorca island (Spain), we evaluated how the landscape (habitat loss) and orchard local managemen...

Understanding temporal dynamics in ecological networks is crucial to predict their capability to cope with global changes. Despite this, proper quantification of network dynamics still remains a challenge. Temporal dynamics are typically studied using data of interaction networks over time, through the evaluation of interaction turnover and its two...

Ecological intensification has been embraced with great interest by the academic sector but is still rarely taken up by farmers because monitoring the state of different ecological functions is not straightforward. Modelling tools can represent a more accessible alternative of measuring ecological functions, which could help promote their use among...

Pollination networks are increasingly used to model the complexity of interactions between pollinators and flowering plants in communities. Different methods exist to sample these interactions, with direct observations of plant-pollinator contacts in the field being by far the most common. Although the identification of pollen carried by pol-linato...

Pollinator-mediated selection is supposed to influence floral integration. However, the potential pathway through which pollinators drive floral integration needs further investigations. We propose that pollinator proboscis length may play a key role in the evolution of floral integration. We first assessed the divergence of floral traits in 11 Lon...

The topological structure of interaction networks determines community dynamics and stability. Closeness centrality is a species-level attribute that measures the relative position and proximity of species in the interaction network. We assessed the link between closeness centrality of crops in plant-pollinator interaction networks and crop seed pr...

Background and Aims The loss of natural habitats may strongly affect the fitness of plants that depend on animals for reproduction. However, very little is known regarding the differential effects of habitat disturbance on the distinct phases of the reproductive cycle of plants, especially in non-rewarding species. Methods We assessed the effect...

Floral trait variation may help pollinators and nectar robbers identify their target plants and, thus, lead to differential selection pressure for defense capability against floral antagonists. However, the effect of floral trait variation among individuals within a population on multi-dimensional plant-animal interactions has been little explored....

Bees are a diverse group with more than 1000 species known from the Iberian Peninsula. They have increasingly received special attention due to their important role as pollinators and providers of ecosystem services. In addition, various rapid human-induced environmental changes are leading to the decline of some of its populations. However, we kno...

Understanding the flexibility of interactions and network rewiring (i.e. reassembly of interactions due to partner‐switching) is necessary to comprehend how future anthropogenic changes will affect interspecific interactions and the functioning of communities. A higher rewiring could be expected in more disturbed landscapes because these landscapes...

Loss of habitats and native species, introduction of invasive species, and changing climate regimes lead to the homogenization of landscapes and communities, affecting the availability of habitats and resources for economically important guilds, such as pollinators. Understanding how pollinators and their interactions vary along resource diversity...

Seventy five percent of the world's food crops benefit from insect pollination. Hence, there has been increased interest in how global change drivers impact this critical ecosystem service. Because standardized data on crop pollination are rarely available, we are limited in our capacity to understand the variation in pollination benefits to crop y...

Understanding how pollination services can be maintained in increasingly anthropogenic landscapes is a current challenge for basic and applied ecology. The stability of plant–pollinator communities might increase in heterogeneous landscapes with a high diversity of species and alternative habitats, both through larger independent fluctuations of po...

Morphological trait‐matching and species abundance are thought to be the main factors affecting the frequency and strength of mutualistic interactions. However, the relative importance of trait‐matching and species abundance in shaping species interactions across environmental gradients remains poorly understood, especially for plant–insect mutuali...

Indirect effects arise when one species influences how another species interacts with a third. Pollinator-mediated indirect effects are widespread in many plant communities and are often not restricted to plant species pairs. An analytical framework does not exist yet that allows for the evaluation of indirect effects through shared pollinators in...

Maintaining the diversity of wild bees is a priority for preserving ecosystem function and promoting stability and productivity of agroecosystems. However, wild bee communities face many threats and beekeeping could be one of them, because honey bees may have a strong potential to outcompete wild pollinators when placed at high densities. Yet, we s...

Anthropogenic activity can modify the distribution of species abundance in a community leading to the appearance of new dominant species. While many studies report that an alien plant species which becomes increasingly dominant can change species composition, plant–pollinator network structure and the reproductive output of native plant species, mu...

The expansion of agriculture is a major driver of biodiversity loss worldwide, through changes generated in the landscape. Despite this, very little is still known about the complex relationships between landscape composition and heterogeneity and plant taxonomical and functional diversity in Mediterranean ecosystems that have been extensively mana...

Understanding the effects of landscape fragmentation on global bumblebee declines requires going beyond estimates of abundance and richness and evaluating changes in community composition and trophic and competitive interactions. We studied the effects of forest fragmentation in a Scandinavian landscape that combines temperate forests and croplands...

Habitat fragmentation threatens plant and pollinator communities, as well as their interactions. However, the effects of landscape fragmentation on the pollination of wild plant species are not well understood yet, partly because there are many correlated features in fragmented landscapes (e.g., decreased patch size, increased isolation, and patch...

Aim Intraspecific trait variation (ITV) within natural plant communities can be large, influencing local ecological processes and dynamics. Here, we shed light on how ITV in vegetative and floral traits responds to large‐scale abiotic and biotic gradients (i.e., climate and species richness). Specifically, we tested whether associations of ITV with...

Theoretical models indicate that the structure of plant–pollinator networks has important implications for the reproduction and survival of species. However, despite the growing information on the mechanisms underlying such a structure, it is still difficult to predict the functional consequences of species’ structural positions in these networks....

Herkogamy, the spatial separation of sex organs in hermaphroditic plants, has been proposed as a mechanism to reduce self-pollination and the associated processes of inbreeding and gamete wastage. Longitudinal herkogamy is the most frequent type, with two subtypes: approach herkogamy (anthers below the stigma), which is associated with diverse poll...

High pollinator reliability is essential to maintain a stable and predictable crop production. However, still few studies have considered landscape effects on the stability (low variability)of the pollination service to crops. The stability of pollination services may increase in heterogeneous landscapes with high availability and diversity of alte...

A pesar de que España es uno de los países con mayor diversidad de polinizadores silvestres y, que de su conservación depende el futuro de nuestros cultivos y por tanto de nuestra alimentación, lo cierto es que hoy día seguimos sin conocer el estado de conservación de gran parte de esta fauna, una demanda histórica de la sociedad cien- tífica que s...

Herkogamy, the spatial separation of sex organs in hermaphroditic plants, has been proposed as a mechanism to reduce self-pollination and the associated processes of inbreeding and gamete wastage. Longitudinal herkogamy is the most frequent type, with two subtypes:approach herkogamy (anthers below the stigma), which is associated with diverse polli...

Lista de revisores de la revista ECOSISTEMAS durante el bienio Lista de revisores que han completado revisiones durante el bienio 2019-2020. La labor de los revisores es fundamental para que una publicación científica realice su actividad de manera adecuada y cumpla con sus objetivos de calidad. Todos estos investigadores contribuyeron generosament...

The loss, fragmentation and degradation of natural and semi-natural habitats due to land-use changes is one of the fundamental causes of worldwide pollinator declines. In this paper, we review how land-use changes affect wild native pollinator insects, as well as the particular effects of the three main types of land-use (agriculture, livestock gra...

Seed size is a fundamental life-history trait for plants. A seed number/size trade-off is assumed because the resources invested in reproduction are limited; however, such a trade-off is not always observed. This could be a consequence of the method used for testing it, where the null hypothesis is dictated by common statistical practice, rather th...

Data to test the trade-off at the fruit/infructescence level. Number of seeds and mean seed weight for all the individuals of each study species and site, as well as the plot where they were collected. (CSV)

Data to evaluate the factors related to the intensity of the trade-off at the fruit/infructescence level, and to test the trade-off at the inter-specific level. For each study species and site, fruit organization, the number of ovules per flower, pollen limitation indices, the standardized slope for the trade off seed number/size, as well as the me...

Data to test the trade-off at the plant level. Number of fruits and weight of the total seed production per fruit for all the individuals of each study species and site. (CSV)

Autochthonous plant species are heavily threatened by the increasing spread of invasive insects. The spatial distribution of invasive species’ hosts is likely to play a pivotal role in the establishment and further expansion of the invading species; more specifically, distance and density dependent (DDD) processes linked to plant spatial arrangemen...

Wild pollinators are a valuable natural resource for crops, as they often increase their production and quality. For this reason, there is currently a great interest in the development of management and conservation tools that help to maintain a wide variety of wild pollinators in agro-systems. To achieve this, it becomes a priority to study the di...

In forest fragments, edge effects can influence forest regeneration, but little is known about how edge effects influence seedling performance and the interaction between seedlings and their natural enemies over time. In central Amazonia, we recorded survival and growth (in height and leaf number) and damage by insect herbivores and leaf‐fungal pat...

Environmental gradients in alpine systems may lead to differences in both abiotic conditions and species interactions in very short distances. This may lead to reproductive and phenotypic changes in plants to enhance fitness in each environment. In this study, we explored how the Central Andean Viola maculata responds to the elevation gradient wher...

Pollination is a valuable ecosystem service, and plant–pollinator interactions in particular are known to play a crucial role in conservation and ecosystem functioning. These mutualisms, like other ecological interactions, are currently threatened by different drivers of global change, mainly habitat loss, fragmentation, or modification of its qual...

Background How floral traits and community composition influence plant specialization is poorly understood and the existing evidence is restricted to regions where plant diversity is low. Here, we assessed whether plant specialization varied among four species-rich subalpine/alpine communities on the Yulong Mountain, SW China (elevation from 2725 t...

The exponential increase of mobile telephony has led to a pronounced increase in electromagnetic fields in the environment that may affect pollinator communities and threaten pollination as a key ecosystem service. Previous studies conducted on model species under laboratory conditions have shown negative effects of electromagnetic radiation (EMR)...

The structure of pollination networks is an important indicator of ecosystem stability and functioning. Livestock grazing is a frequent land use practice that directly affects the abundance and diversity of flowers and pollinators and, therefore, may indirectly affect the structure of pollination networks. We studied how grazing intensity affected...

1. Pollinating insects provide important ecosystem services and are influenced by the intensity of grazing. Based on the Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis ( IDH ), pollinator diversity is expected to peak at intermediate grazing intensities. However, this hump‐shaped relationship is rarely found. 2. The effect of grazing intensity was tested on f...

Abstract. Pollinator decline can disrupt the mutualistic interactions between plants and pollinators and potentially affect the maintenance of plant populations. However, there is still little knowledge on how changes in pollinator abundance can affect seedling recruitment, which is essential for population persistence. We experimentally simulated...

Premise of the study: Geographic differences in flower visitor assemblages might lead to among-population differences in the magnitude and pattern of floral integration. However, the role of current pollinator visitation in shaping the magnitude and pattern of floral trait correlations is still controversial. Methods: We used individual-level da...

The structure of pollination networks is an important indicator of ecosystem stability and functioning. Livestock grazing is a frequent land use practice that directly affects the abundance and diversity of flowers and pollinators and, therefore, may indirectly affect the structure of pollination networks. Here we studied how grazing intensity affe...

Background/Question/Methods Pollinating insects provide important ecosystem services and the structure of pollination networks is an important indicator of ecosystem stability and functioning. Livestock grazing is a frequent land use practice that directly affects the abundance and diversity of flowers and pollinators, and therefore, may indirectly...

1. Pollinator decline causes great concern because reduced pollinator availability may negatively affect plants’ seed production and in turn influence seedling recruitment and densities of plant populations. 2. We used a novel experimental approach that simulates pollinator decline to assess the effects of a 4-year reduction in pollinator availabi...

Surface hydrological behaviour is important in drylands because it affects the distribution of soil moisture and vegetation and the hydrological functioning of slopes and catchments. Microplot scale runoff can be relatively easily measured, i.e. by rainfall simulations. However, slope or catchment runoff cannot be deduced from microplots, requiring...

Background and aims: The pollinator-mediated stabilizing selection hypothesis suggests that the specialized pollination system of zygomorphic flowers might cause stabilizing selection, reducing their flower size variation compared with actinomorphic flowers. However, the degree of ecological generalization and of dependence on pollinators varies g...

Failures in the process of pollen transfer among conspecific plants can severely impact female reproductive success. Thus, pollen limitation can cause selection on plant mating systems and floral traits. The relationships between pollen limitation and floral traits might be partly mediated by the quantity and identity of pollinator visits. However,...

The strength of interactions between plants for pollination depends on the abundance of plants and pollinators in the community. The abundance of pollinators may influence plant associations and densities at which individual fitness is maximized. Reduced pollinator visitation may therefore affect the way plant species interact for pollination. We e...

The number of both flowers and co-foragers may affect bumblebees’ local foraging decisions and the effort they devote to each flower during foraging. We studied bumblebees’ local foraging decisions by using an experimental set-up in which bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) foraged for a single species (Salvia farinacea) in patches containing S. farinac...

Long corollas are a classical example of nectar barriers, because they prevent undesired visitors from consuming the reward intended for more effective pollinators. As the investment in nectar barriers increases, flower attractiveness and nectar rewards may also increase to maintain loyal visitation of most effective pollinators; and flowers may be...

Análisis espacial en plántulas de Euterpe edulis (Arecaceae) en el bosque Atlántico ¿Afecta la densidad de adultos a su distribución? Las actividad de frugívoros y dispersores de semillas determina la distribución de las plantas. Estudiamos la influencia de la dispersión de semillas en la distribución espacial del palmito (Euterpe edulis) en el bos...

There is growing concern that current pollinator decline will affect the reproduction of plant species, potentially driving a decline in plant population densities. We experimentally tested whether a reduction in flower visitation caused a reduction in fertilization rate in several species, and whether any reduction in fecundity of species depends...

Differences among plant species in visitation rate and seed set within a community may be explained both by the species' floral traits and the community context. Additionally, the importance of species' floral traits vs. community context on visitation rate and seed set may vary among communities. In communities where the pollinator-to-flower ratio...

1. The local insect composition may be as important as the local floral composition for bumblebees' foraging behaviour. However, little is known about how the local abundance of insects affects the foraging patterns of individuals. 2. Using field observations, we studied the relationships between the local density of previous and simultaneous forag...

1. Understanding how foraging decisions take place at the local scale is relevant because they may directly affect the fitness of individual plants. However, little is known about how local diversity and density affect the foraging behaviour of most pollinator groups. 2. By introducing two potted plant species (Salvia farinacae and Tagetes bonanza)...

• Premise of the study . The fitness of plants depends on their immediate biotic and abiotic environmental surroundings. The floral neighborhood of individual plants is part of this immediate environment and affects the frequency and behavior of their pollinators. However, the interactions among plants for pollination might differ among populations...

The number of pollinators of a plant species is considered a measure of its ecological generalization and may have important evolutionary and ecological implications. Many pollination studies report inter-annual fluctuations in the composition of pollinators to particular species. However, the factors causing such variation are still poorly underst...

Local flower density can affect pollen limitation and plant reproductive success through changes in pollinator visitation and availability of compatible pollen. Many studies have investigated the relationship between conspecific density and pollen limitation among populations, but less is known about within-population relationships and the effect o...

The generalization–specialization continuum exhibited in pollination interactions currently receives much attention. It is well-known that the pollinator assemblage of particular species varies temporally and spatially, and therefore the ecological generalization on pollinators may be a contextual attribute. However, the factors causing such variat...

Climate warming affects the phenology, local abundance and large-scale distribution of plants and pollinators. Despite this, there is still limited knowledge of how elevated temperatures affect plant-pollinator mutualisms and how changed availability of mutualistic partners influences the persistence of interacting species. Here we review the evide...

Positive effects of seed size on germination and survival can be offset by a greater probability of predation or a poorer dispersal of larger seeds. We hypothesized that spatial variation in local selective pressures acting on seed mass may lead to differences in both optimal and observed seed mass among discrete populations. We first examined the...

The pollination syndrome hypothesis has provided a major conceptual framework for how plants and pollinators interact. However, the assumption of specialization in pollination systems and the reliability of floral traits in predicting the main pollinators have been questioned recently. In addition, the relationship between ecological and evolutiona...

Monoecy allows high plasticity in gender expression because the production of separate female and male flowers increases the ability to respond to specific environmental circumstances. We studied variation in sexual expression and its correlates in the monoecious shrub Buxus balearica, for two years, in six populations in the Balearic Islands and f...

Sequences from the ribosomal nuclear internal transcribed spacers (ITS) have been widely used to infer evolutionary hypotheses across a broad range of living organisms. Intraspecific sequence variation is assumed to be absent or negliable in most species, but few detailed studies have been conducted to assess the apportionment of ITS sequence varia...

Masting consists of the synchronous highly variable seed production among years by a plant population. We studied spatiotemporal variation in fruit production in ten populations of Buxus balearica (six in the Balearic Islands and four in the Iberian Peninsula) from 2001 to 2004 in the light of masting. In some of them we assessed, by means of both...

The increasingly common phenomenon of habitat fragmentation raises the probability of pollination failure in a number of species, as both pollen quantity and quality often decrease as populations become isolated. We experimentally investigated whether pollen was limiting reproductive success of the endangered shrub Buxus balearica in five populatio...

Both microhabitat and temporal scales have significant effects on the regeneration process of plant species. However, the consistency of those patterns at large scales is largely unknown, despite of being essential from both an ecological and a conservation viewpoint. In this study, we examined the spatio-temporal variation in the process of regene...

Mixed-pollination systems may allow plants to achieve stable seed production when unpredictable conditions cause variation in the relative success of different pollination modes. We studied variation in time (two years) and space (in five populations, three from an island and two from mainland) in the pollination mode of Buxus balearica, an ambophi...

Frugivorous birds are involved in the distribution of fleshy-fruited plants. In a temperate forest in northern Europe, we investigated how fruit-eating birds and habitat variation affect the local distribution of these plants and what the consequences are to the species composition of the fruit-bearing plant community. We subdivided the forest into...