Andrea C Baquero

• Biologist, MSc. Programme Officer at UN Environment World Conservation Monitoring Centre
• Programme Officer at UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre

The IPBES Global Assessment proposed five key interventions to tackle the drivers of nature deterioration. One of these proposals was to take pre-emptive and precautionary actions in regulatory and management institutions and businesses. Performance standards are tools that can be used to help achieve these interventions. The most influential stand...

The world’s countries are negotiating a post-2020 global biodiversity framework to guide biodiversity actions by governments and other actors. We assessed monitoring possibilities, ranging from scientist-driven to those undertaken by local people, for the current proposed indicators to measure progress towards goals and targets in this framework. O...

Biodiversity is not evenly distributed across the globe and some areas have greater potential to contribute to biodiversity conservation than others. Whilst there are multiple ways to determine priority areas for conservation, for a global institution like the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the funding mechanism for the Convention on Biological...

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), and its monitoring framework, aims to reverse the decline of nature. The GBF tasks governments to report progress towards 23 targets and four goals. The monitoring framework ” Invites Parties and relevant organizations to support community-based monitoring and information systems and citizen...

Plants sustain human life. Understanding geographic patterns of the diversity of species used by people is thus essential for the sustainable management of plant resources. Here, we investigate the global distribution of 35,687 utilized plant species spanning 10 use categories (e.g., food, medicine, material). Our findings indicate general concorda...

The Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) and its monitoring framework aims to reverse the decline of nature. The GBF tasks governments to report progress towards 23 targets and four goals but also “invites Parties and relevant organizations to support community-based monitoring and information systems and citizen science” to improve...

Species traits are thought to predict feeding specialization and the vulnerability of a species to extinctions of interaction partners, but the context in which a species evolved and currently inhabits may also matter. Notably, the predictive power of traits may require that traits evolved to fit interaction partners. Furthermore, local abiotic and...

Species traits are thought to predict feeding specialization and the vulnerability of a species to extinctions of interaction partners, but the context in which a species evolved and currently inhabits may also matter. Notably, the predictive power of traits may require that traits evolved to fit interaction partners. Furthermore, local abiotic and...

Aim: Among the world’s three major nectar-feeding bird taxa, hummingbirds are the most phenotypically specialized for nectarivory, followed by sunbirds, while the honeyeaters are the least phenotypically specialized taxa. We tested whether this phenotypic specialization gradient is also found in the interaction patterns with their floral resources....

Aim To investigate the role of alien plants in mutualistic plant–hummingbird networks, assessing the importance of species traits, floral abundance and insularity on alien plant integration. Location Mainland and insular Americas. Methods We used species-level network indices to assess the role of alien plants in 21 quantitative plant–hummingbird...

Ecological communities that experience stable climate conditions have been speculated to preserve more specialized interspecific associations and have higher proportions of smaller ranged species (SRS). Thus, areas with disproportionally large numbers of SRS are expected to coincide geographically with a high degree of community-level ecological sp...

Island organisms often have wider feeding niches than mainland organisms, and migratory birds breeding on continents often widen their niches when overwintering on islands. Cuba’s low hummingbird richness has puzzled ornithologists for decades. Here, we show that the Cuban hummingbird fauna is less rich than expected based on Cuba’s elevation, when...

Aim To investigate the association between hummingbird–plant network structure and species richness, phylogenetic signal on species' interaction pattern, insu-larity and historical and current climate. Location Fifty-four communities along a c. 10,000 km latitudinal gradient across the Americas (39° N–32° S), ranging from sea level to c. 3700 m a....

One of the most significant goals in community ecology is to explain the processes that determine community structure. In this thesis I combine phylogenetic, ecological data and field observations to elucidate how both evolutionary and ecological factors play distinctive roles in shaping hummingbird communities and their structure in the Antilles....