Ana Benítez-López

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• PhD
• CSIC Tenured scientist at Spanish National Research Council

Island faunas can be characterized by gigantism in small animals and dwarfism in large animals, but the extent to which this so-called ‘island rule’ provides a general explanation for evolutionary trajectories on islands remains contentious. Here we use a phylogenetic meta-analysis to assess patterns and drivers of body size evolution across a glob...

Tropical forests are increasingly degraded by industrial logging, urbanization, agriculture, and infrastructure, with only 20% of the remaining area considered intact. However, this figure does not include other, more cryptic but pervasive forms of degradation, such as overhunting. Here, we quantified and mapped the spatial patterns of mammal defau...

Hunting is a major driver of biodiversity loss, but a systematic large-scale estimate of huntinginduced defaunation is lacking.We synthesized 176 studies to quantify hunting-induced declines of mammal and bird populations across the tropics. Bird and mammal abundances declined by 58% (25 to 76%) and by 83% (72 to 90%) in hunted compared with unhunt...

The urgent need to mitigate and adapt to climate change necessitates a comprehensive understanding of carbon cycling dynamics. Traditionally, global carbon cycle models have focused on vegetation, but recent research suggests that animals can play a significant role in carbon dynamics under some circumstances, potentially enhancing the effectivenes...

Aim Wildlife overexploitation, either for food consumption or for the pet trade, is one of the main threats to bird species in tropical forests. Yet, the spatial distribution and intensity of harvesting pressure on tropical birds remain challenging to quantify. Here, we identify the drivers of hunting‐induced declines in bird abundance and quantify...

According to Bergmann's and Allen's rules, climate change may drive morphological shifts in species, affecting body size and appendage length. These rules predict that species in colder climates tend to be larger and have shorter appendages to improve thermoregulation. Bats are thought to be sensitive to climate and are therefore expected to respon...

The analysis of biodiversity hotspots is crucial for defining and prioritizing conservation areas and efforts. However, periodic reassessments are needed to track spatial shifts and changes in species composition over time. Focusing on steppe birds, one of the most threatened groups of birds in Europe, we identified historical (1998–2002) and curre...

Aim We investigated the effects of habitat destruction and hunting on the functional decline of top predators, specifically jaguar and puma, in the Gran Chaco. Location The 1.1 million km² South American Gran Chaco. Methods We used spatially explicit, individual‐based models for jaguars and pumas, incorporating detailed information on habitat sui...

The Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KM–GBF) envisions a world living in harmony with nature by 2050, with 23 intermediate targets to be achieved by 2030. However, aligning international policy and national and local implementation of effective actions can be challenging. Using steppe birds, one of the most threatened vertebrate grou...

Freshwater sponges fulfill critical ecological functions, including maintaining water quality, regulating nutrient dynamics, offering habitats for diverse taxa, and serving as a vital food source for various species. However, their patterns of dispersal and genetic connectivity remain inadequately understood, posing significant challenges to effect...

Ecological and conservation research has focused on documenting wildlife's behavioural and demographic responses to anthropogenic disturbance. Yet, a significant gap remains in our understanding of the physiological mechanisms that underlie behavioural or demographic adaptations to human activities. Glucocorticoid concentrations (GCCs) are widely c...

The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species underpins much decision-making in conservation and plays a key role in monitoring the status and trends of biodiversity. However, the shortage of funds and assessor capacity slows the uptake of novel data and techniques, hampering its currency, applicability, consistency and long-term viability. To help addre...

Many European farmland bird populations are rapidly declining because of agricultural intensification and land-use changes. Robust estimates of population sizes and trends, habitat use, and protected area coverage within the distribution range are crucial to inform the conservation and management of threatened species. Here we report on the results...

Surveying arboreal wildlife in tropical rainforests is a daunting task: typical survey methods (e.g., focal observations or line transects) imply huge human efforts and are mostly limited to diurnal species. In this context, camera-trapping is a cost-effective method that allows near-continuous data collection over large spatial and temporal scales...

Quantifying the influence of anthropogenic impacts on wildlife and how they affect the structure and spatio-temporal dynamics of species assemblages remains a challenge. In order to cope with human disturbance, wildlife may exhibit behavioural adaptations to minimize spatial or temporal overlap with human activities. Here we utilized camera traps a...

Several hundred species are hunted for wild meat in the tropics, supporting the diets, customs, and livelihoods of millions of people. However, unsustainable hunting is one of the most urgent threats to wildlife and ecosystems worldwide and has serious ramifications for people whose subsistence and income are tied to wild meat. Over the past 18 yea...

Wildlife hunting and trade creates numerous direct human–animal contact opportunities that can facilitate transmission of zoonotic diseases pantropically. Yet, there is a lack of knowledge of which species and areas have a high risk of zoonotic disease spillover due to wildlife hunting and trade. We combined maps of hunting pressure, recent data se...

Comparative extinction risk analysis—which predicts species extinction risk from correlation with traits or geographical characteristics—has gained research attention as a promising tool to support extinction risk assessment in the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. However, its uptake has been very limited so far, possibly because existing model...

Greenspoon et al. (1) used of global population estimates of 392 mammal species to predict the global biomass of mammals. We caution against important limitations in their approach, which likely results in gross underestimations of biomass and its uncertainty. The authors derive >97% of their estimates from the IUCN Red List (RL) database, which is...

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KM-GBF) envisions a world living in harmony with nature by 2050, with 23 intermediate targets to be achieved by 2030. However, aligning international policy and local implementation of effective actions can be challenging. Using steppe birds, one of the most threatened vertebrate groups in Europe,...

Surveillance of pathogen richness in wildlife is needed to identify host species with a high risk of zoonotic disease spillover. While several predictors of pathogen richness in wildlife hosts have been proposed, their relative importance has not been formally examined. This hampers our ability to identify potential disease reservoirs, particularly...

Despite being central to the implementation of conservation policies, the usefulness of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species is hampered by the 14% of species classified as data‐deficient (DD) because information to evaluate these species’ extinction risk was lacking when they were last assessed o...

Comparative extinction risk analysis – which predicts species extinction risk from correlation with traits or geographical characteristics – has gained research attention as a promising tool to support extinction risk assessment in the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. However, its uptake has been very limited so far, possibly because these mode...

Habitat fragmentation and overexploitation of natural resources are the most prevalent and severe threats to biodiversity in tropical forests. Several studies have estimated the effect of these threats on species extinction risk, however the effect resulting from their interaction remains poorly understood. Here, we assess whether and how habitat a...

We call for journals to commit to requiring open data be archived in a format that will be simple and clear for readers to understand and use. If applied consistently, these requirements will allow contributors to be acknowledged for their work through citation of open data, and facilitate scientific progress.

Knowledge of species' functional traits is essential for understanding biodiversity patterns, predicting the impacts of global environmental changes, and assessing the efficiency of conservation measures. Bats are major components of mammalian diversity and occupy a variety of ecological niches and geographic distributions. However, an extensive co...

Aim: How population density varies across animal species in the context of environmental gradients, and associated migratory strategies, remains poorly understood. The recent influx of avian trait data and population density estimates allows these patterns to be described and explored in unprecedented detail. This study aims to identify the main ma...

Surveillance of pathogen richness in wildlife is needed to identify host species with high zoonotic spillover risk. Many predictors of pathogen richness in wildlife hosts have been proposed, but these predictors have mostly been examined separately and not at the pantropical level. Here we analyzed 15 proposed predictors of pathogen richness using...

Islands have long been recognized as distinctive evolutionary arenas leading to morphologically divergent species, such as dwarfs and giants. We assessed how body size evolution in island mammals may have exacerbated their vulnerability, as well as how human arrival has contributed to their past and ongoing extinctions, by integrating data on 1231...

Habitat destruction and overexploitation are the main threats to biodiversity and where they co-occur, their combined impact is often larger than their individual one. Yet, detailed knowledge of the spatial footprints of these threats is lacking, including where they overlap and how they change over time. These knowledge gaps are real barriers for...

Aim Whether intraspecific spatial patterns in body size are generalizable across species remains contentious, as well as the mechanisms underlying these patterns. Here we test several hypotheses explaining within‐species body size variation in terrestrial vertebrates including the heat balance, seasonality, resource availability and water conservat...

The prey naivety hypothesis posits that prey are vulnerable to introduced predators because many generations in slow gradual coevolution are needed for appropriate avoidance responses to develop. It predicts that prey will be more responsive to native than introduced predators and less responsive to introduced predators that differ substantially fr...

Abstract While linear infrastructures, such as roads and power lines, are vital to human development, they may also have negative impacts on wildlife populations up to several kilometres into the surrounding environment (infrastructure‐effect zones, IEZ). However, species‐specific IEZs are not available for the vast majority of species, hampering g...

Biodiversity is severely threatened by habitat destruction. As a consequence of habitat destruction, the remaining habitat becomes more fragmented. This results in time‐lagged population extirpations in remaining fragments when these are too small to support populations in the long term. If these time‐lagged effects are ignored, the long‐term impac...

Understanding how species respond to climate change is key to informing vulnerability assessments and designing effective conservation strategies, yet research efforts on wildlife responses to climate change fail to deliver a representative overview due to inherent biases. Bats are a species‐rich, globally distributed group of organisms that are th...

We thank the authors of the commentary of our paper “Where might we find ecologically intact communities” (Grantham et al., 2022) for their interest in our paper (Plumptre et al., 2021) and their critique of some of the methods and conclusions. We here respond to their commentary, where many of their points have been well-made, with the aim of adva...

Aim Population density is a key parameter in ecology and conservation, and estimates of population density are required for a wide variety of applications in fundamental and applied ecology. Yet, in terrestrial mammals these data are available for only a minority of species, and their availability is taxonomically and geographically biased. Here, w...

Global biodiversity is under high and rising anthropogenic pressure. Yet, how the taxonomic, phylogenetic, and functional facets of biodiversity are affected by different threats over time is unclear. This is particularly true for the two main drivers of the current biodiversity crisis: habitat destruction and overexploitation. We provide the first...

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species is central in biodiversity conservation, but insufficient resources hamper its long-term growth, updating, and consistency. Models or automated calculations can alleviate those challenges by providing standardised estimates required for assessments, or prioriti...

Seed dispersal by frugivorous bird species involves a fine temporal tuning between fruiting plants and birds. However, this interaction may be severely threatened by anthropogenic climate and land-use change, which may result in phenological mismatches and pervasive ecological consequences for avian communities. In this study, we evaluate changes a...

• The partition of the ecological niche can enhance the coexistence of predators due to differences in how they exploit three main resources: food, space, and time, the latter being an axis that often remains unexplored. • We studied niche segregation in a Mediterranean mesocarnivore community composed by Vulpes vulpes, Genetta genetta, Meles meles...

Aim Climate change will likely modify the global distribution of biomes, but the magnitude of change is debated. Here, we followed a trait‐based, statistical approach to model the influence of climate change on the global distribution of biomes. Location Global. Methods We predicted the global distribution of plant community mean specific leaf ar...

Results of the 2019 national census of Pin-tailed Sandgrouse (Pterocles achata) and Black-bellied Sandgrouse (Pterocles orientalis) in Spain

Several hundred species are hunted for wild meat in the tropics, supporting the diets, customs, and livelihoods of millions of people. However, unsustainable hunting is one of the most urgent threats to wildlife and ecosystems worldwide and has serious ramifications for people whose subsistence and income are tied to wild meat. Over the past 18 yea...

Several hundred species are hunted for wild meat in the tropics, supporting the diets, customs, and livelihoods of millions of people. However, unsustainable hunting is one of the most urgent threats to wildlife and ecosystems worldwide and has serious ramifications for people whose subsistence and income are tied to wild meat. Over the past 18 yea...

Human activities are altering the structure of ecosystems, compromising the benefits they provide to nature and people. Effective conservation actions and management under ongoing global change rely on a better understanding of socio-ecological patterns and processes across broad spatiotemporal scales. Both macroecology and conservation science con...

Aim The stress-gradient hypothesis (SGH) postulates that species interactions shift from negative to positive with increasing abiotic stress. Interactions between species are increasingly being recognized as important drivers of species distributions, but it is still unclear whether stress-induced changes in interactions affect continental-to-globa...

1. To be effective, the next generation of conservation practitioners and managers need to be critical thinkers with a deep understanding of how to make evidence-based decisions and of the value of evidence synthesis. 2. If, as educators, we do not make these priorities a core part of what we teach, we are failing to prepare our students to make an...

Transcurridos 14 años del primer censo nacional sobre la especie, en 2019, con la inestimable colaboración de las comunidades autónomas y miles de voluntarios, se ha vuelto a repetir el trabajo que actualiza la situación poblacional de la especie.

Transcurridos 14 años del primer censo nacional sobre la especie, en 2019, con la inestimable colaboración de las comunidades autónomas y miles de voluntarios, se ha vuelto a repetir el trabajo que actualiza la situación poblacional de la especie.

Conservation efforts should target the few remaining areas of the world that represent outstanding examples of ecological integrity and aim to restore ecological integrity to a much broader area of the world with intact habitat and minimal species loss while this is still possible. There have been many assessments of “intactness” in recent years bu...

Human population growth and the activities resulting in habitat destruction are a threat to biodiversity worldwide. Despite the recognized importance of dung beetles in supporting tropical forest ecosystems, our understanding of their susceptibility to anthropogenic pressures remains limited. Previous research detailed the overall consequences of h...

Aim Forecasting changes in species distribution under future scenarios is one of the most prolific areas of application for species distribution models (SDMs). However, no consensus yet exists on the reliability of such models for drawing conclusions on species' distribution response to changing climate. In this study, we provide an overview of com...

Global biodiversity is under high and rising anthropogenic pressure. Yet, how the taxonomic, phylogenetic, and functional facets of biodiversity are affected by different threats over time is unclear. This is particularly true for the two main drivers of the current biodiversity crisis: habitat destruction and overexploitation. We provide the first...

1. To be effective, the next generation of conservation practitioners and managers need to be critical thinkers with a deep understanding of how to make evidence‐based decisions and of the value of evidence synthesis. 2. If, as educators, we do not make these priorities a core part of what we teach, we are failing to prepare our students to make an...

Aim The recent recovery of large carnivores in Europe has been explained as resulting from a decrease in human persecution driven by widespread rural land abandonment, paralleled by forest cover increase and the consequent increase in availability of shelter and prey. We investigated whether land cover and human population density changes are relat...

The partition of the ecological niche can enhance the coexistence of predators due to differences in how they exploit three main resources: food, space, and time, the latter being an axis that remains often unexplored. We studied niche segregation in a Mediterranean mesocarnivore community in sites where the top predator, the Iberian lynx, is abse...

Under current global change context, climate change is driving substantial phenological mismatches between plant species and the organisms that rely on them. Given that frugivorous birds are fundamental for forest regeneration, and most of them are migrant species, identifying the effect of global change over them must be a priority. In this study...

Understanding spatiotemporal variations of movements and habitat selection by animals living in changing, heterogeneous environments under increasing human pressure is crucial for biodiversity conservation. We report here on shifts in habitat selection and movements during the breeding and non-breeding periods in a vulnerable and specialist bird, t...

Island faunas can be characterized by gigantism in small animals and dwarfism in large animals, but the extent to which this so-called ‘island rule’ provides a general explanation for evolutionary trajectories on islands remains contentious. Here we use a phylogenetic meta-analysis to assess patterns and drivers of body size evolution across a glob...

Aim Forecasting changes in species distribution under future scenarios is one of the most prolific areas of application for species distribution models (SDMs). However, no consensus yet exists on the reliability of such models for drawing conclusions on species distribution response to changing climate. In this study we provide an overview of commo...

Packaging materials can be a source of chemical contaminants in food. Process-based migration models (PMM) predict the chemical fraction transferred from packaging materials to food (FC) for application in prioritisation tools for human exposure. These models, however, have a relatively limited applicability domain and their predictive performance...

Habitat destruction and overexploitation are the main threats to biodiversity and where they co‐occur, their combined impact is often larger than their individual one. Yet, detailed knowledge of the spatial footprints of these threats is lacking, including where they overlap and how they change over time. These knowledge gaps are real barriers for...

Land use and hunting are 2 major pressures on biodiversity in the tropics. Yet, their combined impacts have not been systematically quantified at a large scale. We estimated the effects of both pressures on the distributions of 1884 tropical mammal species by integrating species’ range maps, detailed land‐use maps (1992 and 2015), species‐specific...

Aim Predictions of plant traits over space and time are increasingly used to improve our understanding of plant community responses to global environmental change. A necessary step forward is to assess the reliability of global trait predictions. In this study, we predict community mean plant traits at the global scale and present a systematic eval...

Field ecologists and macroecologists often compete for the same grants and academic positions, with the former producing primary data that the latter generally use for model parameterization. Primary data are usually cited only in the supplementary materials, thereby not counting formally as citations, creating a system where field ecologists are r...

Scenario‐based biodiversity modelling is a powerful approach to evaluate how possible future socio‐economic developments may affect biodiversity. Here, we evaluated the changes in terrestrial biodiversity intactness, expressed by the mean species abundance (MSA) metric, resulting from three of the shared socio‐economic pathways (SSPs) combined with...

AimField ecologists and macroecologists often compete for the same grants and academic positions, with the former producing original data that the latter generally use for model parameterization. Original data are usually cited only in the supplementary materials thereby not counting formally as citations, creating an unfair system where field ecol...

The IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) Red List categories and criteria are the most widely used framework for assessing the relative extinction risk of species. The criteria are based on quantitative thresholds relating to the size, trends, and structure of species’ distributions and populations. However, data on these parameter...

Santini et al. 2019. Applying habitat and population density models to land cover time series to inform IUCN Red List assessments. Conservation Biology doi: 10.1111/cobi.13279

Overhunting is a main driver of biodiversity loss in the tropics, yet there is virtually no information about the spatial variation of hunting-induced defaunation and the areas where impacts might be most severe. Here we: 1) Assess spatial patterns of mammal defaunation due to hunting pressure across the pantropical forest area. 2) Assess the deg...

Aim Experimental nitrogen (N) addition (fertilization) studies are commonly used to quantify the impacts of increased N inputs on plant biodiversity. However, given that plant community responses can vary considerably among individual studies, there is a clear need to synthesize and generalize findings with meta‐analytical approaches. Our goal was...

About 75% of Earth’s land surface is currently modified by human activities (1). The expanding footprint of human activities is not only causing the loss of habitat and biodiversity but also affecting the dynamics of wildlife populations. Researchers have long examined human-induced spatial shifts in the distribution of wildlife, but temporal adjus...

Large variations in removal efficiencies (REs) of chemicals have been reported for monitoring studies of activated sludge wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). In this work, we conducted a meta-analysis on REs (1539 data points) for a set of 209 chemicals consisting of fragrances, surfactants, and pharmaceuticals in order to assess the drivers of th...

Our study provides an integrated analysis of the variability of greenhouse gas (GHG) footprints of field grown tomatoes for processing. The global farm-specific dataset of 890 observations across 14 countries over a three-year period (2013-2015) was obtained from farms grown under Unilever’s sustainable agricultural code. It repre-sents on average...

Body mass is rarely recorded in amphibians, and other body measurements (e.g. Snout to vent length, SVL) are generally collected instead. However length measurements, when used as proxies of body mass in comparative analyses, are problematic if different taxa and morphotypes are included. We developed allometric relationships to derive body mass fr...

Habitat selection is an inherently scale-sensitive process in which detected selection patterns frequently depend on the scale of analysis employed. We used a multi-scale modelling approach to identify how the distributions of two sympatric birds are shaped by differential selection at the landscape, land use and microhabitat scales and by human in...