Aurora TorresUniversity of Alicante | UA · Ecology
Aurora Torres
PhD in Ecology
About
28
Publications
15,282
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702
Citations
Citations since 2017
Publications
Publications (28)
Due to the growing awareness of potential impacts of roads, managers demand well-designed studies about the implications of linear infrastructures on ecosystems. We illustrate the application of Before–During–After and Before–During–After-Control–Impact designs (BDA and BDACI) to assess effects of highway construction and operation using a populati...
Context
Urban sprawl and the expanding transportation infrastructure drive land consumption and landscape fragmentation, causing environmental deterioration and loss of species. Current understanding of how these drivers interact to shape landscape fragmentation is still poor. However, a strong correlation between urban sprawl and landscape fragmen...
Significance
Nature is increasingly threatened by rapid infrastructure expansion. For the first time, to our knowledge, we quantify the high pervasiveness of transportation infrastructure in all European countries. Unfortunately, spatial definition of the areas ecologically affected by infrastructure at large scales is complicated. Thus, we present...
Between 1900 and 2010, the global volume of natural resources used in buildings and transport infrastructure increased 23-fold (1). Sand and gravel are the largest portion of these primary material inputs (79% or 28.6 gigatons per year in 2010) and are the most extracted group of materials worldwide, exceeding fossil fuels and biomass (2). In most...
Rewilding is emerging as a promising restoration strategy to enhance the conservation status of biodiversity and promote self-regulating ecosystems while re-engaging people with nature. Overcoming the challenges in monitoring and reporting rewilding projects would improve its practical implementation and maximize its conservation and restoration ou...
Globally increasing demand for construction sand needs to be met with transparent and responsible supply-networks. Currently, there are no scalable methods for tracing construction sand distribution without direct observation. We examined sand “fingerprinting” as a potential tool to trace construction sand supply-networks from “source to sink” in a...
Ecological connectivity should be an important consideration in environmental assessment (EA). How often and how thoroughly the analysis of ecological connectivity is integrated in the EA process is, however, unknown. We surveyed EA actors and stakeholders regarding their perceptions of, and experiences with, connectivity analysis in the context of...
Sand, gravel, and crushed rock—together referred to as construction aggregates—are the world’s most extracted solid materials by mass. China’s annual consumption of construction aggregates reached over 20 billion tons in 2018, accounting for nearly half of global consumption. This article provides an overview of the use of sand and gravel in China,...
Construction minerals – sand, gravel, limestone – are the most extracted solid raw materials ¹ and account for most of the world’s anthropogenic mass, which as of 2020 outweighed all of Earth’s living biomass ² . However, knowledge about the magnitude, geography, and profile of this widespread threat to biodiversity remains scarce and scattered 3–6...
Illicit supply networks (ISNs) are composed of coordinated human actors that source, transit, and distribute illicitly traded goods to consumers, while also creating widespread social and environmental harms. Despite growing documentation of ISNs and their impacts, efforts to understand and disrupt ISNs remain insufficient due to the persistent lac...
Sand, gravel, and crushed rock, together referred to as construction aggregates, are the most extracted solid materials. Growing demand is damaging ecosystems, triggering social conflicts, and fueling concerns over sand scarcity. Balancing protection efforts and extraction to meet society's needs requires designing sustainable pathways at a system...
Building trust in science and evidence-based decision-making depends heavily on the credibility of studies and their findings. Researchers employ many different study designs that vary in their risk of bias to evaluate the true effect of interventions or impacts. Here, we empirically quantify, on a large scale, the prevalence of different study des...
In an increasingly interconnected world, human-environment interactions involving flows of people, organisms, goods, information, and energy are expanding in magnitude and extent, often over long distances. As a universal paradigm for examining these interactions, the telecoupling framework (published in 2013) has been broadly implemented across th...
Telecoupled flows of people, organisms, goods, information, and energy are expanding across the globe. Causes are integral components of the telecoupling framework, yet the rigor with which they have been identified and evaluated to date is unknown. We address this knowledge gap by systematically reviewing causal attribution in the telecoupling lit...
In the first 40 years of the 21st century, planet Earth is highly likely to experience more urban land expansion than in all of history, an increase in transportation infrastructure by more than a third, and a great variety of land reclamation projects. While scientists are beginning to quantify the deep imprint of human infrastructure on biodivers...
Desde mediados del s. XX están teniendo lugar procesos de cambio en el paisaje y en el clima a una velocidad sin precedentes. En este tiempo, las especies que viven en zonas agrícolas han sufrido una fuerte regresión y han pasado a encontrarse entre las más amenazadas. En este estudio 1) analizamos la existencia de retrasos en la respuesta de las a...
Telecouplings are socioeconomic and environmental interactions over distances. Sand is mined worldwide for many uses and accounts for the largest volume of solid material extracted globally, making sand mining and trade an important telecoupling. Sand is extracted at a rate far greater than its renewal and is therefore a limited resource. Historica...
As a result of the age-old co-evolution between farming systems and natural habitats in the Mediterranean basin, the agricultural landscapes harbour an extraordinary amount of biodiversity. However, farmland is today the habitat in Europe with the highest proportion of bird species with unfavourable conservation status. Agricultural intensification...
El fartet, pequeño pez en peligro de extinción que es además un endemismo ibérico, tiene su única población del término municipal de Alicante en un entorno muy humanizado y degradado, carente de cualquier tipo de protección legal. Es urgente actuar para asegurar el futuro de esta valiosa población.
Road density is being increased due to a constant development of the transport network. This fact is especially noticeable in peri-urban areas, becoming crucial the planning and management of activities. In most of the studies which analyze road effects focused on population items, the weakness of the analysis performed questions the results. We st...
Este trabajo evaluó la influencia de una vía trashumante, la Cañada Real Conquense, sobre la distribución espacial de tres especies de caza menor: la perdiz roja (Alectoris rufa), el conejo (Oryctolagus cuniculus) y la liebre ibérica (Lepus granatensis). Para ello se seleccionaron tres zonas: cultivos, monte mediterráneo y mixta. Se estudiaron los...
The aim of the work was to get activated carbon supports with different SOG content and distribution, to increase as activity as stability of Fe/AC catalysts in CWPO of phenol.
Projects
Project (1)
This project focuses on strengthening the EU restoration agenda through identifying opportunities for creating a coherent ecological network in Europe by promoting and using rewilding principles.
The project is implemented by a coalition of 5 organisations covering scientific, policy and practical expertise: German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), Rewilding Europe, WWF EPO, Birdlife International and EEB.
