Carolina Bello

• PostDoc Position at ETH Zurich

A myriad of factors influence species interactions, and determining their relative importance is a major challenge in community ecology. Here, we explored the multiple factors influencing hummingbird visitation rates to flowers by considering pollinator and floral traits alongside the broader ecological context (i.e. phenology and floral abundance)...

Aim Climate change represents one of the main threats to global biodiversity, and such alterations are expected to induce shifts in distribution ranges and diversity patterns. We evaluate if protected areas and forest remnants in the Atlantic Forest in South America (AF) are projected to ensure the taxonomic diversity (TD) and phylogenetic diversit...

The presence in ecological communities of unfeasible species interactions, termed forbidden links, due to physiological or morphological exploitation barriers has been long debated, but little direct evidence has been found. Forbidden links are likely to make ecological communities less robust to species extinctions, stressing the need to assess th...

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...

Understanding how species extinctions affect communities of interacting species is an important challenge of ecology. The presence of unfeasible interactions, termed forbidden links, due to physiological or morphological barriers, is likely to decrease the plasticity of interaction networks, affecting their robustness to species extinctions. Howeve...

An often-overlooked question of the biodiversity crisis is how natural hazards contribute to species extinction risk. To address this issue, we explored how four natural hazards, earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, and volcanoes, overlapped with the distribution ranges of amphibians, birds, mammals, and reptiles that have either narrow distributions...

Plant–hummingbird interactions are considered a classic example of coevolution, a process in which mutually dependent species influence each other’s evolution. Plants depend on hummingbirds for pollination, whereas hummingbirds rely on nectar for food. As a step towards understanding coevolution, this review focuses on the macroevolutionary consequ...

Reductions in natural habitats urge that we better understand species’ interconnection and how biological communities respond to environmental changes. However, ecological studies of species’ interactions are limited by their geographic and taxonomic focus which can distort our understanding of interaction dynamics. We focus on bird-plant interacti...

On-going land-use change has profound impacts on biodiversity by filtering species that cannot survive in disturbed landscapes and potentially altering biotic interactions. In particular, how land-use change reshapes biotic interactions remains an open question. Here, we used selectivity experiments with nectar feeders in natural and converted fore...

Among global change drivers, deforestation not only erodes biodiversity but also the functions that species play in an ecosystem. The maintenance of many ecosystem functions, such as pollination, depends on the functional roles fulfilled by interacting plants and animals. Given that plants and animals respond differently to deforestation, a perspec...

Quantifying the vulnerability of ecosystems to global change requires a better understanding of how trophic ecosystem functions emerge. So far, trophic ecosystem functions have been studied from the perspective of either functional diversity or network ecology. To integrate these two perspectives, we propose the interaction functional space (IFS) a...

Seed dispersal is an ecosystem service strongly affected by the loss of mutualist dispersers, with economic consequences in terms of carbon sequestration and climate change mitigation policies. Especially, large frugivores are important contributors to carbon sequestration because they are the main disperser of large-seeded trees, which store a hig...

Wild boar (Sus scrofa) is one of the most damaging invasive species in the world and can have a profound impact on the distribution of native species. Nevertheless, there still are limitations on the species’ current fine-scale spatial information, which is needed to develop effective management measures. Here, we used Species Distribution Models (...

The evolutionary stability of fruit-eating birds is linked to their role in dispersing seeds

Climate change and reductions in natural habitats necessitate that we better understand species' interactivity and how biological communities respond to environmental changes. However, ecological studies of species' interactions are limited by geographic and taxonomic bias which can lead to severe under-representation of certain species and distort...

Invasive species can significantly affect native species when their niches are similar. Ecological and morphological similarities between the invasive Australian palm, Archontophoenix cunninghamiana, and the native palm from the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, Euterpe edulis, suggest that they have similar environmental requirements and functional roles...

The Atlantic Forest of South America hosts one of the world’s most diverse and threatened tropical forest biota. After five centuries of European human expansion, most Atlantic Forest landscapes are archipelagos of small forest fragments surrounded by open-habitat matrices. In this chapter, we describe the causes and consequences of large-scale def...

Aim Forest fragmentation is among the principal causes of global biodiversity loss, yet how it affects mutualistic interactions between plants and animals at large spatial scale is poorly understood. In particular, tropical forest regeneration depends on animal‐mediated seed dispersal, but the seed‐dispersing animals face rapid decline due to fores...

Here we compile a data set comprising morphological and life history information of 279 mammal species from 39,850 individuals of 388 populations ranging from 5.83 to 29.75 decimal degrees of latitude and 34.82 to 56.73 decimal degrees of lon- gitude in the Atlantic forest of South America. We present trait information from 16,840 individ- uals of...

Measures of traits are the basis of functional biological diversity. Numerous works consider mean species-level measures of traits while ignoring individual variance within species. However, there is a large amount of variation within species and it is increasingly apparent that it is important to consider trait variation not only between species,...

The extinction of large frugivores has consequences for the recruitment of large-seeded plants with potential lasting effects on carbon storage in tropical rainforests. However, previous studies relating frugivore defaunation to changes in carbon storage ignore potential compensation by redundant frugivores and the effects of seed predators on plan...

The extinction of frugivores has been considered one of the main drivers of the disruption of important ecological processes, such as seed dispersal. Many defaunated forests are too small to restore function by reintroducing large frugivores, such as tapirs or Ateline monkeys, and the long-term fate of large-seeded plants in these areas is uncertai...

Assessing the conservation value of restoration plantings is critical to support the global forest landscape restoration movement. We assessed the implications of tree species selection in the restoration of Brazil's Atlantic Forest regarding carbon stocking and species conservation. This assessment was based on a comprehensive dataset of seedling...

The contribution of small mammal ecology to the understanding of macroecological patterns of biodiversity, population dynamics and community assembly has been hindered by the absence of large datasets of small mammal communities from tropical regions. Here we compile the largest dataset of inventories of small mammal communities for the Neotropical...

The dataset provided here includes 8320 frugivory interactions (records of pairwise interactions between plant and frugivore species) reported for the Atlantic Forest. The dataset includes interactions between 331 vertebrate species (232 birds, 90 mammals, five fishes, one amphibian and three reptiles) and 788 plant species. We also present informa...

Carbon storage is widely acknowledged as one of the most valuable forest ecosystem services. Deforestation, logging, fragmentation, fire, and climate change have significant effects on tropical carbon stocks; however, an elusive and yet undetected decrease in carbon storage may be due to defaunation of large seed dispersers. Many large tropical tre...

Fig. S1. Distribution function of seed size diameter (mm) dispersed by the major frugivores in the Atlantic forest, Brazil. Fig. S2. Maximum tree height by class of species according to its seed diameter and wood density. Fig. S3. Relationship between wood density and seed diameter by dispersal mode. Fig. S4. Relationships between abiotic variables...

The structure of the Atlantic Forest (AF) has been studied for almost 70 years. However, the related existing knowledge is spread over hundreds of documents, many of them unpublished and/or difficult to access. Synthesis initiatives are available, but they are restricted to only a few parts or types of the AF or are focused on species occurrence. H...

The economic valuation of biodiversity and ecosystem services plays an important role in Colombia’s conservation planning and economic development, but gathering data to conduct an original study can be expensive. To this end, there is an alternative yet controversial method called "benefits transfer". Here, we present a meta-analysis of available...

LA REGIÓN ANDINA, EL PIEDEMONTE AMAZÓNICO Y LA GUAJIRA PODRÍAN PRESENTAR UN INCREMENTO EN EL NÚMERO DE ESPECIES DE PLANTAS DE ALTO RIESGO DE INVASIÓN BAJO ESCENARIOS DE CAMBIO CLIMÁTICO.

Crocodylus intermedius (Graves 1819), commonly known at the Orinoco Crocodile, is an endemic species of the Orinoco River Basin that occurs in Colombia and Venezuela. Within the Neotropical Crocodylia, it is considered the most endangered species, listed as Critically Endangered. The use of potential distribution models is an important tool in biog...

This paper presents e-clouds as a tool to support biodiversity decision making, offering a Software as a Service (SaaS) paradigm to execute computing and technic intensive applications such as species distribution models. But mere access to these tools is not enough if usability and economy are not aligned with users interests. This article present...

La presente publicación pretende ilustrar las lecciones aprendidas en el proceso de diseño e implementación temprana de un esquema de Pago por Servicios Ecosistémicos en la cuenca del Río Ranchería (Guajira - Colombia). Además, busca demostrar como este tipo de instrumentos pueden complementar el logro de metas sociales, económicas y ambientales al...