Ana M. C. Santos

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Ramon y Cajal Research Fellow at Autonomous University of Madrid

1. Taxonomic and geographic biases are common in biodiversity inventories, especially in hyperdiverse taxa, such as the Ichneumonoidea. Despite these problems, biodiversity databases could be a valuable source of information if their reliability is carefully assessed. 2. One major problem of using these data for large-scale analyses is the unevenne...

Aim To establish the extent to which archipelagos follow the same species–area relationship as their constituent islands and to explore the factors that may explain departures from the relationship. Location Thirty-eight archipelagos distributed worldwide. Methods We used ninety-seven published datasets to create island species–area relationships (...

Aim To examine whether island parasitoid faunas are biased towards generalists when compared with the mainland and their species pool, and to evaluate the effects of climate, island characteristics and regional factors on the relative proportions of idiobionts (i.e. generalists) and koinobionts (i.e. specialists) of two parasitic wasp families, Bra...

Oceanic islands, recognised for their isolation, high endemic species richness and unique evolutionary paths compared with their continental counterparts, are extremely susceptible to anthropogenic activities. The fragmentation of island habitats and disruption of native ecosystems has increased the risk of extinction for many endemic species, incl...

Insect declines have been reported globally but whilst island ecosystems are potentially facing exacerbated challenges, no long-term studies (LTER) have confirmed this trend. This study utilises the first available LTER data on island invertebrates, targeting epigeal and canopy arthropods from the Azores, and covering over 20 years in three distinc...

Human activities drive ecological transformation, impacting island ecosystems from species diversity to ecological traits, mainly through habitat degradation and invasive species. Using two unique long‐term datasets we aim to evaluate whether species traits (body size, trophic level, dispersal capacity and habitat occupancy) can predict temporal va...

Aim We aim to find the main drivers of the taxonomic and functional richness and functional dispersion of vertebrates (amphibians, birds, primates, marsupials, rodents, bats and medium‐ and large‐sized mammals) across the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. We also aim to identify hotspots of vertebrate diversity and quantify the extent to which they are le...

Islands are biodiversity hotspots that host unique assemblages. However, a substantial proportion of island species are threatened and their long‐term survival is uncertain. Identifying and preserving vulnerable species has become a priority, but it is also essential to combine this information with other facets of biodiversity like functional dive...

Human activities drive ecological transformation, impacting island ecosystems from species diversity to ecological traits, mainly through habitat degradation and invasive species. Using two unique long-term datasets we aim to evaluate whether species traits (body size, trophic level, dispersal capacity and habitat occupancy) can predict temporal va...

Globally, there is a concerning decline in many insect populations, and this trend likely extends to all arthropods, potentially impacting unique island biota. Native non-endemic and endemic species on islands are under threat due to habitat destruction, with the introduction of exotic, and potentially invasive, species, further contributing to thi...

Beta diversity patterns are essential for understanding how biological communities are structured. Geographical and environmental factors, as well as species dispersal ability, are important drivers of beta diversity, but their relative importance may vary across spatial scales. In this study, we evaluate whether beta diversity changes across geogr...

COLE TCH, SANTOS AMC (2023) HEXAPODA – FILOGENIA de INSECTOS y ALIADOS © Cole, Santos 2023 (CC-BY), Spanish version of: COLE (2023) HEXAPODA – PHYLOGENY of INSECTS and ALLIES • árbol hipotético basada principalmente en datos de transcriptómica de Misof et al. (2014) • longitudes de rama deliberadas, no refleja la ventana temporal real • número de e...

Dung removal by macrofauna such as dung beetles is an important process for nutrient cycling in pasturelands. Intensification of farming practices generally reduces species and functional diversity of terrestrial invertebrates, which may negatively affect ecosystem services. Here, we investigate the effects of cattle-grazing intensification on dung...

Introduction The conversion of natural habitats to agricultural systems is one of the main global threats to bats. Here, we aimed to develop a systematic mapping to identify publication trends and research gaps in studying bats and agricultural systems. Methods We reviewed 309 studies published between 1990 and 2021 that sampled bats in agricultur...

Roughly 2 billion ha of land are degraded and in need of ecological restoration worldwide. Active restoration frequently involves revegetation, which leads to the dilemma of whether to conduct direct seeding or to plant nursery-grown seedlings. The choice of revegetation method can regulate plant survival and performance, with economic implications...

We argue that naming species in honour of a specific person is unjustifiable and out of step with equality and representation. Reforming taxonomy to remove eponyms will not be easy but could bring multiple benefits for both conservation and society.

One of the main strategies to reduce the global loss of biodiversity has been the establishment of protected areas (PAs). High quality biodiversity knowledge is essential to successfully design PAs and PA networks, and to assess their conservation effectiveness. However, biodiversity knowledge is taxonomically and geographically biased. Even though...

Species' environmental requirements and large‐scale spatial and evolutionary processes determine the structure and composition of local communities. However, ecological interactions also have major effects on community assembly at landscape and local scales. We evaluate whether two xerophytic shrub communities occurring in SW Portugal follow constr...

A long-term study monitoring arthropods (Arthropoda) is being conducted since 2012 in the forests of Azorean Islands. Named "SLAM - Long Term Ecological Study of the Impacts of Climate Change in the natural forest of Azores", this project aims to understand the impact of biodiversity erosion drivers in the distribution, abundance and diversity of A...

Beta diversity patterns are essential for understanding how biological communities are structured. Geographical and environmental factors, as well as species dispersal ability, are important drivers of beta diversity, but their relative importance may vary across spatial scales. In this study, we evaluate whether beta diversity changes across geogr...

Traits are key for understanding the environmental responses and ecological roles of organisms. Trait approaches to functional ecology are well established for plants, whereas consistent frameworks for animal groups are less developed. Here we suggest a framework for the study of the functional ecology of animals from a trait‐based response–effect...

Background: Long-term studies are key to understand the drivers of biodiversity erosion, such as land-use change and habitat degradation, climate change, invasive species or pollution. The long-term project SLAM (Long Term Ecological Study of the Impacts of Climate Change in the natural forest of Azores) started in 2012 and focuses on arthropod mo...

Aim: Species’ environmental requirements and large-scale spatial and evolutionary processes are known to determine the structure and composition of local communities. However, ecological interactions and historical processes also have major effects on community assembly at landscape and local scales. In this work we evaluate whether two xerophytic...

For centuries, islands and mountains have incited the interest of naturalists, evolutionary biologists and ecologists. Islands have been the cradle for biogeography and speciation theories, while mountain ranges have informed how population adaptation to thermal floors shapes the distribution of species globally. Islands of varying size and mountai...

Research in Macaronesia has led to substantial advances in ecology, evolution and conservation biology. We review the scientific developments achieved in this region, and outline promising research avenues enhancing conservation. Some of these discoveries indicate that the Macaronesian flora and fauna are composed of rather young lineages, not Tert...

Biddick & Burns (2021) proposed a null/neutral model that reproduces the island rule as a product of random drift. We agree that it is unnecessary to assume adaptive processes driving island dwarfing or gigantism, but several flaws make their approach unrealistic and thus unsuitable as a stochastic model for evolutionary size changes.

Protected areas (PAs) have been created with the purpose of preserving biodiversity, acting as refuges from anthropogenic pressures. Traditionally, PAs have been designed and managed to represent mainly taxonomic diversity, ignoring other diversity facets such as its functional and phylogenetic components. Yet, functional and phylogenetic diversity...

Aim Environmental niche tracking is linked to the species ability to disperse. While well investigated on large spatial scales, dispersal constraints also influence small‐scale processes and may explain the difference between the potential and the realized niche of species at small scales. Here we test whether niche size and niche fill differ syste...

Accelerating ecosystem disruption Oceanic islands are among the most recent areas on Earth to have been colonized by humans, in many cases in just the past few thousand years. Therefore, they are important laboratories for the study of human impacts on natural vegetation and biodiversity. Nogué et al. provide a quantitative palaeoecological study o...

Biodiversity drives ecological functioning, ultimately providing ecosystem services. Ecosystem processes are favored by greater functional diversity, particularly when groups of functionally different species interact synergistically. Many of such functions are performed by insects, among which dung beetles stand out for their important role in dun...

Aim The Island Rule—that is, the tendency for body size to decrease in large mammals and increase in small mammals on islands has been commonly evaluated through macroecological or macroevolutionary, pattern‐orientated approaches, which generally fail to model the microevolutionary processes driving either dwarfing or gigantism. Here, we seek to id...

Women and men’s representation in advanced stages of the scientific career is unbalanced, a fact that has been related with different factors, namely the time dedicated to motherhood. The perception of the impact of motherhood and fatherhood on the development of the scientific career in Life Sciences in Spain was evaluated through a survey carried...

Species diversity varies in space and time. Temporal changes in the structure and dynamics of communities can occur at different scales. We investigated the temporal changes of dung beetle assemblages in the Amazonian region along seasons, years, and successional stages. We evaluated if assemblage structure changes between temporal scales and wheth...

Does the loss of species through habitat decline follow the same pattern whether the area lost is part of a large or a small habitat? An analysis sheds light on this long-running debate, with its implications for conservation strategies. Large and small areas of habitat have different patterns of species loss.

Aim Historical climate variations, current climate and human impacts are known to influence current species richness, but their effects on phylogenetic and trait diversity have been seldom studied. We investigated the relationship of these three factors with the independent variations of species, phylogenetic and trait diversity of European mammals...

According to the island rule, small-bodied vertebrates will tend to evolve larger body size on islands, whereas the opposite happens to large-bodied species. This controversial pattern has been studied at the macroecological and biogeographical scales, but new developments in quantitative evolutionary genetics now allow studying the island rule fro...

Aim An individual tree resembles a living island, a small spatially distinct unit upon which colonizers maintain populations. However, several differences exist compared to oceanic islands: a tree is relatively young, is composed of numerous differently aged branches, may be phylogenetically isolated from neighbours, and some of its colonizers are...

Islands harbour evolutionary and ecologically unique biota, which are currently disproportionately threatened by a multitude of anthropogenic factors, including habitat loss, invasive species and climate change. Native forests on oceanic islands are important refugia for endemic species, many of which are rare and highly threatened. Long-term monit...

Insects play a key role in the regulation and dynamics of many ecosystem services (ES). However, this role is often assumed, with limited or no experimental quantification of its real value. We examined publication trends in the research on ES provided by insects, ascertaining which ES and taxa have been more intensively investigated, and which met...

Background: Understanding the processes that determine community assembly and their dynamics is a central issue in ecology. The analysis of functional diversity can improve our understanding of these dynamics by identifying community assembly processes. Aims: We studied the effect of environment–community co-variations on both functional diversity...

Species abundance distributions (SAD) are central to the description of diversity and have played a major role in the development of theories of biodiversity and biogeography. However, most work on species abundance distributions has focused on one single spatial scale. Here we used data on arthropods to test predictions obtained with computer simu...

Aims The 50th anniversary of the publication of the seminal book, The Theory of Island Biogeography, by Robert H. MacArthur and Edward O. Wilson is a timely moment to review and identify key research foci that could advance island biology. Here, we take a collaborative horizon-scanning approach to identify 50 fundamental questions for the continued...

Background In this contribution we present detailed distribution and abundance data for arthropod species identified during the BALA – Biodiversity of Arthropods from the Laurisilva of the Azores (1999-2004) and BALA2 projects (2010-2011) from 18 native forest fragments in seven of the nine Azorean islands (all excluding Graciosa and Corvo islands,...

Appendix 2 - Metadata from Appendix 1

Appendix 5 -Abundance data

Appendix 1 - Detailed data on the distribution and abundance of the studied species

Appendix 3 - Sites UTM coordinates

Appendix 4. Complete list of new records per island.

Species populations change in space and time affecting community structure. Such changes are mainly due to either species loss or non-random species replacement, that generate two differential patterns: nestedness and turnover, respectively. Here, we evaluate the changes in the structure of dung beetles assemblages (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae) over s...

Insects play an important key role in the regulation and dynamics of many ecosystem services (ES). However, this role is often assumed and there is no experimental quantification of its real value. Based on a literature review of different online platforms (Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar) we made an exhaustive search of published article...

Understanding the processes that lead to successful invasions is essential for the management of exotic species. We aimed to assess the comparative relevance of habitat (both at local and at regional scale) and plant features on the species richness of local canopy spiders of both indigenous and exotic species. In an oceanic island, Azores archipel...

Aim The processes leading to the assembly of ecological communities can determine their functional structure. We assess the influence of biogeographical correlates associated with species diversity gradients on the global patterns of functional diversity of island parasitoid assemblages ( H ymenoptera, B raconidae). We also evaluate whether island...

Aim: Much of our current understanding of ecological and evolutionary processes comes from island research. With the increasing availability of data on distributions and phylogenetic relationships and new analytical approaches to understanding the processes that shape species distributions and interactions, a re-evaluation of this ever-interesting...

Dune plant assemblages are affected by severe conditions, which makes them excellent models for studying the effects of species interactions and environmental conditions on community structure. We evaluate the relationship between the structure of dune communities, local environmental conditions and the suitability of climatic conditions for their...

In a recent editorial, Whittaker (2014, Journal of Biogeography, 41, 1–5) suggested that biogeography is in the process of adopting a ‘big science’ model, characterized by increasing levels of individual specialization and international collaboration. Using network analysis based on co-authored articles and bibliometrics, we trace this transformati...

En este capítulo revisamos algunos aspectos de esta “crisis de la Taxonomía”, identificando puntos críticos de la misma. Para ello, primero definimos qué es la Taxonomía, con una breve descripción de su desarrollo histórico. Además, identificamos quién la lleva a cabo, así como en qué grado son importantes unas u otras aproximaciones a esta discipl...

Species richness on oceanic islands has been related to a series of ecological factors including island size and isolation (i.e. the Equilibrium Model of Island Biogeography, EMIB), habitat diversity, climate (i.e., temperature and precipitation) and more recently island ontogeny (i.e. the General Dynamic Model of oceanic island biogeography, GDM)....

Macroecology studies large-scale patterns with the aim of identifying the effects of general ecological processes. Although lakes (and ponds) are particularly suited for macroecological research due to their discrete nature and non geographically-structured variability, the development of this discipline in lentic habitats is comparatively much sma...

The presence of researchers from Western (i.e., developed world) institutions in Amazonia has frequently been contentious due to fears of 'scientific imperialism' or suspicions that they may be exerting undue influence over research agendas and knowledge production to the detriment of local researchers. Such negative perceptions are widespread, but...

Aim We explore the island species–area relationships ( ISARs ) of several plant groups differing in dispersal ability. We examine whether: (i) the ISAR slope is higher for less dispersive groups (diminishing from not‐wind‐dispersed seed plants to wind‐dispersed seed plants, pteridophytes and bryophytes); and (ii) the regional richness is higher tha...

outreach paper in Magazine: Pingo de Lava

Habitat destruction is the leading cause of species extinctions. However, there is typically a time-lag between the reduction in habitat area and the eventual disappearance of the remnant populations. These ‘‘surviving but ultimately doomed’’ species represent an extinction debt. Calculating the magnitude of such future extinction events has been h...

Carine & Schaefer (Journal of Biogeography, 2010, 37, 77–89) suggest that the lack of past climate oscillations in the Azores may have contributed to the low plant endemism in this archipelago, compared to the Canary Islands, a pattern they term the Azorean diversity enigma. Here we challenge their hypothesis, and discuss how the particular charact...

Species on islands tend to use a wider range of resources than their mainland counterparts. In this thesis I investigated whether island parasitoid communities have proportionally more idiobiont species (which tend to have a wider host range; i.e. are more generalist) than their mainland source, and which factors determine island community structur...

Parasitoids, which mainly include taxa belonging to the Hymenoptera, play an important role in the maintenance of other arthropod populations, acting as regulators of host densities. However, the large‐scale patterns of these insects and the factors that shape them are still not well established. In this review we focus on several aspects of the bi...

Island communities are exposed to several evolutionary and ecological processes that lead to changes in their diversity and structure compared to mainland biotas. These phenomena have been observed for various taxa but not for parasitoids, a key group in terms of community diversity and functioning. Here we use the parasitoid communities associated...

We investigate the macroecological patterns of the terrestrial biota of the Azorean archipelago, namely the species-range size distributions, the distance decay of similarity, and the island species–area relationship (ISAR). We use the most recent up-to-date checklists to describe the diversity at the island level for nine groups (Lichens, Fungi, D...