David Sánchez-Fernández

• PostDoc Position at University of Murcia

Ongoing global climate change presents serious challenges in conservation biology, forcing us to revisit previous tools and principles based on how species may respond to novel climatic conditions. There is currently a major gap between predictions of species vulnerability and management strategies, despite the fact that linking these areas is fund...

Aim The contrasting habitat permanence over geological time‐scales of lotic and lentic habitats may impose different constraints on the dispersal ability of their macroinvertebrate populations, and ultimately on the degree of equilibrium with current climate. We aim to test for differences between species typical of either habitat type in their pot...

Considering how organisms adapt to stress is essential if we are to anticipate biological responses to global change in ecosystems. Communities in stressful environments can potentially be assembled by specialists (i.e. species that only occur in a limited range of environmental conditions) and/or generalist species with wider environmental toleran...

Full text here: https://rdcu.be/ckZGL

Global biodiversity is currently facing an unprecedented extinction rate because of increased anthropogenic pressures, which often cause local or regional extirpations of wildlife populations. Once extinct from a given region, wildlife populations might be officially reintroduced upon the cessation of the threats that caused past declines. However,...

This study aims to contribute to the current knowledge of aquatic macroinvertebrate communities (mainly coleoptera, hemiptera, and molluscs) in the Quípar River, designated as a Special Area of Conservation as part of the Natura 2000 Network. A total of 30 species belonging to 19 families were recorded. The lower sections, with some saline influenc...

Negotiations are underway on the new European Union (EU) Water Directive (1), which will regulate the protection and sustainable use of Europe’s water resources. However, the proposal foregoes environmental quality standards specifically tailored to sensitive groundwater species and fails to require biomonitoring for groundwater ecosystems. Despite...

Carrion ecology, i.e. the decomposition and recycling of dead animals, has traditionally been neglected as a key process in ecosystem functioning. Similarly, despite the large threats that inland aquatic ecosystems (hereafter, aquatic ecosystems) face, the scientific literature is still largely biased towards terrestrial ecosystems. However, there...

Freshwater macroinvertebrates are a diverse group and play key ecological roles, including accelerating nutrient cycling, filtering water, controlling primary producers, and providing food for predators. Their differences in tolerances and short generation times manifest in rapid community responses to change. Macroinvertebrate community compositio...

Datos recopilados en los artículos examinados sobre la región de estudio, especies estudiadas (información taxonómica y especificidad por el medio subterráneo), metodología y resultados. Los resultados cuantitativos se muestran como un único valor (ej.: temperatura letal), como una tasa de cambio porcentual entre dos tratamientos de temperatura (%/...

Freshwater ecosystems are among the most threatened worldwide. A great part of this threat comes from climate and land cover changes. This situation is specially worrying in areas and ecosystems that are highly relevant in terms of biodiversity but severely impacted by these two factors, such as water bodies in North Africa. Using water beetles as...

Subterranean ecosystems (comprising terrestrial, semi-aquatic, and aquatic components) are increasingly threatened by human activities; however, the current network of surface-protected areas is inadequate to safeguard subterranean biodiversity. Establishing protected areas for subterranean ecosystems is challenging. First, there are technical obst...

This chapter provides simple and direct identification keys for adults (at genus level) and larvae (at family level) of the Mediterranean aquatic Coleoptera considered as “true water beetles,” that is, those species of beetles that spent most of the time of their adult stage submerged (larvae and pupae may be aquatic or terrestrial). We have includ...

Groundwater is a vital ecosystem of the global water cycle, hosting unique biodiversity and providing essential services to societies. Despite being the largest unfrozen freshwater resource, in a period of depletion by extraction and pollution, groundwater environments have been repeatedly overlooked in global biodiversity conservation agendas. Dis...

Subterranean ecosystems (e.g., caves, groundwaters, fissure systems) are often overlooked in global climate change and conservation agendas. This contrasts with their widespread distribution, rich biodiversity, and importance to humans as providers of multiple ecosystem services. Worryingly, evidence is accumulating regarding diverse biological alt...

Aquatic ecosystems are particularly vulnerable to the introduction of non-indigenous species (NIS), leading to multi-faceted ecological, economic and health impacts worldwide. The Iberian Peninsula comprises an exceptionally biodiverse Mediterranean region with a high number of threatened and endemic aquatic species, most of them strongly impacted...

Identification and Ecology of Freshwater Arthropods in the Mediterranean Basin covers the entire Mediterranean basin, including parts of Europe, Asia, Africa and the Mediterranean islands, but excluding other biogeographic locations with Mediterranean climates located outside the region. The book provides an extensive description of the taxonomy an...

1. Biodiversity conservation is a central imperative of the 21st century. Subterranean ecosystems deliver critical nature's contributions to people and harbour a broad diversity of poorly understood specialised organisms. However, the subterranean biome is still largely overlooked in global biodiversity targets. 2. We assessed how well subterrane...

Owing to a long history of anthropogenic pressures, freshwater ecosystems are among the most vulnerable to biodiversity loss¹. Mitigation measures, including wastewater treatment and hydromorphological restoration, have aimed to improve environmental quality and foster the recovery of freshwater biodiversity². Here, using 1,816 time series of fresh...

Los ecosistemas subterráneos son sistemáticamente olvidados en las estrategias globales de cambio climático y conservación de la biodiversidad, pese a que brindan servicios ecosistémicos clave y albergan una proporción considerable de la biodiversidad global, amenazada por la actividad humana y el calentamiento global. En este artículo realizamos u...

Aim Understanding biodiversity patterns is crucial for prioritizing future conservation efforts and reducing the current rates of biodiversity loss. However, a large proportion of species remain undescribed (i.e. unknown biodiversity), hindering our ability to conduct this task. This phenomenon, known as the ‘Linnean shortfall’, is especially relev...

The climatic variability hypothesis (CVH) predicts that organisms in more thermally variable environments have wider thermal breadths and higher thermal plasticity than those from more stable environments. However, due to evolutionary trade-offs, taxa with greater absolute thermal limits may have little plasticity of such limits (trade-off hypothes...

The authors regret that the printed version of the above article contained an incomplete version of Table 1, in which only 20 invasive alien species were published out of the top-ranked 24 that should have been. The correct Table 1 is shown below. The authors apologise for any inconvenience caused.

As the number of introduced species keeps increasing unabatedly, identifying and prioritising current and potential Invasive Alien Species (IAS) has become essential to manage them. Horizon Scanning (HS), defined as an exploration of potential threats, is considered a fundamental component of IAS management. By combining scientific knowledge on tax...

An important goal of LIFE INVASAQUA is to develop tools that will improve management and increase the efficiency of the Early Warning and Rapid Response (EWRR) framework for Invasive Alien Species (IAS) in the Iberian Peninsula. Horizon scanning for high risk IAS is basic when implementing measures to reduce new invasions and to focus efforts on th...

Groundwater is a vital ecosystem of the global water cycle, hosting unique biodiversity and providing essential services to societies. Despite being the largest unfrozen freshwater resource, in a period of depletion by extraction and pollution, groundwater environments have been repeatedly overlooked in global biodiversity conservation agendas. Dis...

The conservation of freshwater biodiversity is a global challenge for conservation biologists. The loss of freshwater biodiversity in the Mediterranean basin is particularly concerning given its biodiversity hotspot status and that its landscapes have been subject to anthropogenic modification and pressures for millennia. Most research on this regi...

One of the main current environmental problems is the high rate of species extinctions associated with human activities. In a context of limited resources for biodiversity conservation, setting conservation priorities is therefore necessary. Hence, this study aims at prioritising the most interesting species and areas for the conservation of water...

The conservation of biodiversity is a central imperative of the 21st century. Subterranean ecosystems deliver critical nature's contributions to people and harbour a broad diversity of poorly-understood specialized organisms that are of interest from both a conservation and evolutionary perspective. However, the subterranean biome is still systemat...

Subterranean ecosystems are among the most widespread environments on Earth, yet we still have poor knowledge of their biodiversity. To raise awareness of subterranean ecosystems, the essential services they provide, and their unique conservation challenges, 2021 and 2022 were designated International Years of Caves and Karst. As these ecosystems h...

The conservation of freshwater biodiversity is one of the main challenges for this century, especially in Mediterranean ecosystems. This study aims to improve the knowledge on the aquatic macroinvertebrates of the Sierra Espuña Regional Park, one of the protected spaces of higher interest in the Iberian southeast. Through field sampling and bibliog...

Farmland bird populations are declining worldwide as a consequence of agricultural intensifi-cation, and the loss of singular landscape elements has been suggested as one of the main drivers. This scenario of agroecosystem simplification is even more exacerbated in arid and semiarid regions, where traditional small waterbodies (SWB) are rapidly van...

Conservation-planning approaches must be supported by a good understanding of the geographical distribution of species. Despite the efforts conducted so far to compile data on aquatic insects, the information on the distribution of water beetles in Morocco is scarce. In this study, we assess for the first time the degree of inventory quality of aqu...

Coping with aridity is a physiological challenge for all organisms, including freshwater ones. Aridity shapes distributions of aquatic species at fine and large geographical scales. Specifically, for aquatic beetles, the desiccation resistance of the adults is a potential constraint for the colonisation of arid regions. We assessed the congruence b...

Brazil’s caves, home to diverse species and minerals, were stripped of protections by a recent presidential decree.

The climatic variability hypothesis predicts the evolution of species with wide thermal tolerance ranges in environments with variable temperatures, and the evolution of thermal specialists in thermally stable environments. In caves, the extent of spatial and temporal thermal variability experienced by taxa decreases with their degree of specializa...

• Evaluating data quality and inventory completeness must be a preliminary step in any biodiversity research, particularly in the case of insects and high biodiversity areas. Yet, this step is often neglected or, at best, assessed only for one insect group, and the degree of congruence of sampling effort ffor different insect groups remains unexplo...

Freshwater ecosystems are exposed to an increasing number of stressors, challenging their biomonitoring and management. Despite recent advances in multiple-stressor research, regional-scale assessments in areas with high freshwater biodiversity and increasing anthropogenic pressure are urgently needed. We reviewed 61 studies focused on freshwater i...

Rivers are dynamic ecosystems in which both human impacts and climate‐driven drying events are increasingly common. These anthropogenic and natural stressors interact to influence the biodiversity and functioning of river ecosystems. Disentangling ecological responses to these interacting stressors is necessary to guide management actions that supp...

Scientists are renewing their efforts to predict the impact of climate change on biodiversity. Subterranean environments represent ideal systems to study the effect of global change in species with poor dispersal capabilities. We assess the vulnerability to climate change of the subterranean pseudoscorpion Neobisium (Blothrus) vasconicum vasconicum...

The 15th UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) (COP15) will be held in Kunming, China in October 2021. Historically, CBDs and other multilateral treaties have either alluded to or entirely overlooked the subterranean biome. A multilateral effort to robustly examine, monitor, and incorporate the subterranean biome into future conservation targ...

The 15th UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) (COP15) will be held in Kunming, China in October 2021. Historically, CBDs and other multilateral treaties have either alluded to or entirely overlooked the subterranean biome. A multilateral effort to robustly examine, monitor, and incorporate the subterranean biome into future conservation targ...

• Human activities are an increasing threat to Neotropical freshwater ecosystems, with the potential extinction of thousands of aquatic species. Despite this, knowledge about the effectiveness of protected area networks in protecting aquatic insects in this biogeographical region is very limited. • Cuba supports the highest diversity of aquatic ins...

1. The description of how biological information is compiled over time is essential to detect temporal biases in biodiversity data that could directly influence the utility, comparability, and reliability of ecological and biogeographical studies. 2. We explore trends in species recording over time using one of the most spatially and temporally com...

Se presenta una lista actualizada de las especies exóticas que se encuentran en etapa de establecimiento o de propagación de la invasión en aguas continentales de la península ibérica. La lista está basada en la evaluación sistemática de los datos en colaboración con un amplio equipo de expertos de España y Portugal. Esta lista de actualización es...

An updated list is presented of the alien species in the establishment or spread invasion stage in in-land waters at the Iberian Peninsula. The list is based on a systematic assessment of information in collaboration with a wide expert team from Spain and Portugal. This updated list is an important tool supporting the implementation of the IAS Regu...

An updated list is presented of the alien species in the transport or introduction invasion stage in inland waters of the Iberian Peninsula. The list is based on a systematic assessment of information in collaboration with a wide expert team from Spain and Portugal. This list is an important tool to support the implementation of the IAS Regulation,...

This study investigated the effect of the main physicochemical factors in structuring aquatic macroinvertebrate assemblages of three streams in northern Tunisia. Aquatic macroinvertebrate and water physicochemical surveys were carried out seasonally in 2013, at three pristine sites and three altered sites located, respectively, in the upstream and...

The European Natura 2000 (N2K) network of protected areas stands out as the main conservation strategy in the European Union to preserve biodiversity under the auspices of the Convention on Biological Diversity. The management of N2K sites is mainly focused on protecting the biological elements as Special Areas of Conservation for habitats or speci...

Much recent scientific, media and public attention has focussed on the evidence for and consequences of declines in insect biodiversity. Reliable, complete inventories can be used to estimate insect trends accurately, but incomplete data may distort assessments of biodiversity change. Thus, it is essential to understand the completeness of insect i...

Since alien species may threaten native ecosystems when becoming invasive, one of the main challenges is try to predict their potential spread. Despite bees are essential pollinators and provide important ecosystem services in their native areas, outside these areas they could represent a risk for the local bee fauna, e.g. by competing for resource...

GARCÍA-MESEGUER AJ, SÁNCHEZ-FERNÁNDEZ D, MILLÁN A, ESTEVE MA & ROBLEDANO F. Biogeography and conservation of terrestrial and aquatic molluscs in a semiarid Mediterranean region. XX Congress of Iberian Association of Limnology (AIL-2020) & III Iberoamerican Congress of Limnology (CIL-2020) (26-29 October 2020, Murcia, Spain): The aquatic ecosystems...

Physiological traits are key in determining the vulnerability of narrow range, highly specialized animals to climate change. It is generally predicted that species from more stable environments possess lower thermal tolerance breadths and thermal plasticity than those from more variable habitats – the so‐called ‘climatic variability hypothesis’. Ho...

Accurate assessments of species vulnerability to climate change need to consider the physiological capacity of organisms to deal with temperature changes and identify early signs of thermally induced stress. Oxidative stress biomarkers and acetylcholinesterase activity are useful proxies of stress at the cellular and nervous system level. Such resp...

In memoriam to Ignacio Ribera (1963-2020)L

Land-use intensification (LUI) and biological invasions are two of the most important global change pressures driving biodiversity loss. However, their combined impacts on biological communities have been seldom explored, which may result in misleading ecological assessments or mitigation actions. Based on an extensive field survey of 445 paired in...

Abstract Cave‐dwelling ectotherms, which have evolved for millions of years under stable thermal conditions, could be expected to have adjusted their physiological limits to the narrow range of temperatures they experience and to be highly vulnerable to global warming. However, most of the few existing studies on thermal tolerance in subterranean i...

Accurate assessments of species' vulnerability to climate change require integrated measurements of its different drivers, including extrinsic (the magnitude and rate of climate change) and intrinsic factors (organisms' sensitivity and adaptive capacity). According to these factors, aquatic insects restricted to alpine ponds may be especially threa...

The Iberian Peninsula is one of the European regions with the highest number of endemic species. Therefore, it is imperative to identify species populations potentially affected by variations in ecosystem functioning. Since the emergence of data processed from satellites, the possibility of carrying out studies covering both a spatial and temporal...

1. Climate change is expected to produce shifts in species distributions as well as behavioural, life‐history, and/or morphological adaptations to find suitable conditions or cope with the altered environment. Most of our knowledge on this issue comes from studies on vertebrates, mainly endotherm species. However, it remains uncertain how small ect...

Resumen: En Cuba está registrada la mayor riqueza de especies de la familia Dytiscidae de las Antillas. Sin embargo, no existe ningún trabajo recopilatorio que permita la identificación a nivel específico. El objetivo de este estudio fue la confección de claves dicotómicas ilustradas para las especies en estado adulto de la familia Dytiscidae de Cu...

Cave-dwelling ectotherms, which have evolved for millions of years under stable thermal conditions, could be expected to have adjusted their physiological limits to the narrow range of temperatures they experience and be highly vulnerable to global warming. However, the few existing studies on thermal physiology in subterranean invertebrates point...

The need to use surrogates of biodiversity is quite relevant in threatened habitats harboring high values of biodiversity, such as the Mediterranean aquatic ecosystems. In this study, we assess the performance of eight macroinvertebrate groups (Coleoptera, Heteroptera, Odonata, Trichoptera, Plecoptera, Ephemeroptera, Crustacea, and Mollusca) as sur...

Abiotic stress shapes how communities assemble and support ecological functions. However, it remains unclear whether artificially increasing or decreasing stress levels would lead to communities assembling predictably along a single axis of variation or along multiple context-dependent trajectories of change. In response to stress intensity alterat...

Under global change, the ion concentration of aquatic ecosystems is changing worldwide. Many freshwater ecosystems are being salinized by anthropogenic salt inputs, whereas many naturally saline ones are being diluted by agricultural drainages. This occurs concomitantly with changes in other stressors, which can result in additive, antagonistic or...

One of the main challenges in disciplines such as ecology, biogeography, conservation and evolutionary biology is to understand and predict how species will respond to environmental changes, especially within a climate change context. We focus on the deep subterranean environment to minimize uncertainties in predictions, because it is one of the fe...

Background. Predicting the patterns of range expansion of alien species is central to develop effective strategies for managing potential biological invasions. Here, we present a study on the potential distribution of the American cavity-nesting, Orthoptera-hunting and solitary wasp, Isodontia mexicana (Hymenoptera: Sphecidae), which was first dete...

Thermal tolerance is a key vulnerability factor for species that cannot cope with changing conditions by behavioural adjustments or dispersal, such as subterranean species. Previous studies of thermal tolerance in cave beetles suggest that these species may have lost some of the thermoregulatory mechanisms common in temperate insects, and appear to...

Biodiversity databases are typically incomplete and biased. We identify their three main limitations for characterizing the geographic distributions of species: unknown levels of survey effort, unknown absences of a species from a region, and unknown level of repeated occurrence of a species in different samples collected at the same location. Thes...

The risk of extinction of Eurylophella iberica Keffermuller and Da Terra 1978 (Ephemeroptera, Ephemerellidae) was assessed for the first time after taking into account recently published distributional data using a method specifically designed for aquatic insects. The results showed that the species can be considered "moderately vulnerable". We dis...

Vulnerability of Dytiscidae species (Coleoptera) in Cuba. Cuba has one of the richest diving beetles species diversity in the Caribbean islands. However, Cuban Dytiscidae remain scarcely studied, and there is need to identify those species and habitats that urgently require effective conservation actions. Here we aim to identify the threatened taxa...

Cuba has one of the richest diving beetles species diversity in the Caribbean islands. However, Cuban Dytiscidae remain scarcely studied, and there is need to identify those species and habitats that urgently require effective conservation actions. Here we aim to identify the threatened taxa of the family Dytiscidae in Cuba according to their degre...

RESUMEN: Este artículo presenta el proyecto de investigación CAVEheAT (cambio climático, nicho térmico y conservación de la biodiversidad subterránea). El objetivo del proyecto es estudiar el nicho térmico (rango de tolerancia térmica y capacidad de aclimatación) de especies (principalmente coleópteros) con diferentes grados de especialización al m...

Eurylophella iberica Keffermüller and Da Terra, 1978 is an endemic insect species of the Iberian Peninsula whose distribution has been poorly studied to date with rather old and scattered records. Here we compiled all existing distribution records and add new records from recent sampling activities. We also used this updated distributional informat...

One of the main challenges in ecology, biogeography and evolution is to understand and predict how species may respond to environmental changes. Here we focus on the deep subterranean environment, a system that minimizes most of the typical uncertainties of studies on epigean (surface) environments. Caves are relatively homogeneous habitats with ne...

The Iberian Peninsula is a major European region of biodiversity, as it harbours more than 30% of European endemic species. Despite a number of studies having evaluated the ability of nature reserves to protect certain taxa, there is still a lack of knowledge on how Iberian endemic fauna are represented in these reserves. We detected biodiversity h...

Species of the genus Meladema (Dytiscidae, Colymbetinae) are some of the largest macroinvertebrates in the western Palearctic region, being top predators in fishless streams. Two of the three described species, Meladema imbricata (Wollaston, 1871) and Meladema lanio (Fabricius, 1775) are Macaronesian endemics from the Canary Islands and Madeira, re...

One of the most important issues in biodiversity conservation is an exploration of the relationships among protected areas, land-use changes and biodiversity, so we aimed to assess the performance of the Natura 2000 network (N2000) in representing the bat conservation hotspots in peninsular Spain and the Balearic Islands and to compare the rates of...