Diego P. Vázquez

National Scientific and Technical Research Council | conicet · IADIZA - Instituto Argentino de Investigaciones de las Zonas Aridas

Biological invasions represent one of the main threats to biodiversity. The honeybee has been deliberately introduced into a wide range of habitats worldwide. Currently, beekeeping is turning to natural areas in search of better honey quality. This practice can boost honeybee abundance, with potential ecological consequences in the local ecosystems...

How do species' distributions respond to their environments? This question was at the heart of the Clements-Gleason controversy, ecology's most famous debate. Do species respond to the environment in concerted ways, leading to distinct and cohesive assemblages (the Clementsian paradigm), or do species respond to the environment independently (the G...

Landscape heterogeneity may affect components of biodiversity, including pollinators and the ecosystem function they perform. Landscape heterogeneity may also affect pollinator movement and pollen and gene flow. We assessed how changes in landscape compositional heterogeneity generated by agricultural activities affect the pollen transport service...

Biological invasions represent one of the main threats to biodiversity. The honeybee has been deliberately introduced into a wide range of habitats worldwide. Currently, beekeeping is turning to natural areas in search of better honey quality. This practice can boost honeybee abundance, with potential ecological consequences in the local ecosystems...

The honeybee, Apis mellifera, stands out for its positive image due to its contribution to crop pollination and honey production, which facilitated its widespread distribution. However, large apiaries resulting in high honeybee densities could increase pollination frequency while increasing competition for floral resources, ultimately affecting nat...

Dryland ecosystems are among the most widespread biomes on Earth and sustain nearly 40% of the global human population. Knowledge on drylands throughout the world has come from diverse disciplinary fields including natural and social sciences. The use of quantitative tools, such as science mapping or bibliometric analysis, may help to explore the s...

Plant–pollinator interactions are ecologically and economically important, and, as a result, their prediction is a crucial theoretical and applied goal for ecologists. Although various analytical methods are available, we still have a limited ability to predict plant–pollinator interactions. The predictive ability of different plant–pollinator inte...

Abstract Few studies have evaluated how climate is mechanistically related to species richness in mountain environments. We used path analysis to evaluate predictions of several mechanistic hypotheses based on their hypothesized mechanism relating climate with richness of darkling beetles (Coleoptera: Tenebrionidae). We modeled the influence of spa...

Species interactions are critical for maintaining community structure and dynamics, but the effects of invasive species on multitrophic networks remain poorly understood. We leveraged an ongoing invasion scenario in Patagonia, Argentina, to explore how non-native ungulates affect multi-trophic networks. Ungulates disrupt a hummingbird-mistletoe-mar...

We assessed the effect that electromagnetic field (EMF) exerts on honeybees' pollination efficiency using field and laboratory experiments. First, we measured levels of gene and protein expression in metabolic pathways involved in stress and behavioral responses elicited by EMF. Second, we assessed the effect of EMF on honeybee behavior and seed pr...

Los escarabajos estercoleros pueden influenciar la emergencia y supervivencia de plántulas. Sin embargo, la dirección y la magnitud de este efecto dependerá de los atributos funcionales de la comunidad de escarabajos estercoleros y de las condiciones ambientales dominantes. Estudiamos el rol de los escarabajos estercoleros en la dispersión de semil...

Introducción y objetivos: El cambio climático, el ganado y el creciente uso turístico favorecen la dispersión de plantas exóticas, amenazando la conservación de los ecosistemas altoandinos. Estudiamos los patrones de distribución de plantas nativas y exóticas en senderos recreativos de montaña. M&M: Implementamos el protocolo MIREN en seis sendero...

The environmental filtering of species traits can influence the identity of their interaction partners and the contribution of species interactions to ecosystem functioning, but the extent to which this process is influenced by landscape composition and configuration remains unclear. We combined a field experiment with an agent‐based model to asses...

Species respond idiosyncratically to environmental variation, which may generate phenological mismatches. We assess the consequences of such mismatches for solitary bees. During 9 years, we studied flowering phenology and nesting phenology and demography of five wood-nesting solitary bee species representing a broad gradient of specialization/gener...

Forest ecosystems play a key role in providing multiple ecosystem services, such as carbon fixation and storage, but face pressures from human development that jeopardize their integrity and functioning. Accurately understanding the relationships between land use-intensity, biodiversity, and carbon storage is important for developing viable strateg...

Species interactions are the backbone of the structure and dynamics of communities. The extensive research into the link between structure and stability has been primarily theoretical and focused on monotrophic networks. Therefore, how the disruption of multitrophic interactions alters communities' response to perturbations in nature remains an ope...

Habitat fragmentation impacts seed dispersal processes that are important in maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. However, it is still unclear how habitat fragmentation affects frugivorous interactions due to the lack of high-quality data on plant-frugivore networks. Here we recorded 10,117 plant-frugivore interactions from 22 reserv...

Species coexisting in ecological communities interact in multiple ways to form complex networks. We review the growing literature on ecological interaction networks to address several key issues about this conceptual and methodological approach. We start by asking the most basic question: Why study networks and whether a network approach is (or is...

Hikers and livestock using mountain trails damage native vegetation and act as seed vectors, thus favouring the spread of non-native plants. We evaluated the effect of trails and livestock abundance on the success of non-native plants in the arid central Andes of Argentina. We surveyed six trails, covering elevations between 2400 and 3570 m a.s.l....

Switching plant species visited by pollinators (partner flexibility) has been proposed as a behavioural mechanism able to attenuate the negative impacts of shifts in plant communities on pollination. However, it is unclear whether the magnitude of such response is generalizable or depends on the environmental context. Moreover, the ability of polli...

Invasive pollinators can disrupt native pollination mutualisms. We investigated the impact of the invasion of the European bumble bee Bombus terrestris in NW Patagonia, Argentina, on the pollination mutualism between the native legume Vicia nigricans and its main pollinator, the native bumble bee B. dahlbomii, and its consequences on plant reproduc...

The global challenge of feeding two billion more people by 2050, using more sustainable agricultural practices whilst dealing with uncertainties associated with environmental change, requires a transformation of food systems. We present a new perspective for how advances in network science can provide novel ways to better understand, harness, and r...

Generalist species are important for maintaining network structure and function. Previous studies showed that interactions between generalists persist across sites and years. However, the mechanisms for persistence across spatiotemporal scales are not clear. To address this gap, we collected data on plant–pollinator interactions throughout the flow...

While large herbivores are critically important components of terrestrial ecosystems and can have pronounced top‐down effects on plants, our understanding of the underlying mechanisms driving these effects remains incomplete. Large herbivores can alter plant growth, reproduction, and abundance through direct effects (predominantly consumption) and...

Larger geographical areas contain more species—an observation raised to a law in ecology. Less explored is whether biodiversity changes are accompanied by a modification of interaction networks. We use data from 32 spatial interaction networks from different ecosystems to analyse how network structure changes with area. We find that basic community...

Understanding the impacts of global change on ecological communities is a major challenge in modern ecology. The gain or loss of particular species and the disruption of key interactions are both consequences and drivers of global change that can lead to the disassembly of ecological networks. We examined whether the disruption of a hummingbird–mis...

It is not uncommon for one or a few species, and their interactions, to have disproportionate effects on other species in ecological communities. Such keystone interactions might affect how communities respond to the invasion of non‐native species by preventing or inhibiting the establishment, spread or impact of non‐native species. We explore whet...

Ecological restoration has been increasingly considering biotic interactions. Different restoration strategies usually rely on different composition and abundance of plants with potential impact on the establishment of plant‐pollinator interactions. We evaluated the restoration of plant‐pollinator interaction networks in young restoration areas in...

Honeybee hives may influence pollen and nectar availability in natural ecosystems, which may consequently affect wild pollinators. We studied the effects of managed honeybee hives on wild bee diversity in Villavicencio Nature Reserve (Mendoza, Argentina). We placed pan traps at increasing distances from honeybee hives to estimate wild bee abundance...

Hikers and livestock using mountain trails damage native vegetation and act as seed vectors, thus favouring the spread of non-native plants. We evaluated the effect of trails and livestock abundance on the success of non-native plants in the arid central Andes of Argentina. We surveyed six trails, covering elevations between 2400 m and 3570 m a.s.l...

Temporal variability of plant–pollinator interactions is important for fully understanding the structure, function, and stability of plant–pollinator networks, but most network studies so far have ignored within-day dynamics. Strong diel dynamics (e.g., a regular daily cycle) were found for networks with Cichorieae, which typically close their flow...

Land-use generates multiple stress factors, and we need to understand their effects on plant–plant interactions to predict the consequences of land-use intensification. The stress–gradient hypothesis predicts that the relative strength of positive and negative interactions changes inversely under increasing environmental stress. However, the outcom...

Generalist species are the linchpins of networks, as they are important for maintaining network structure and function. Previous studies have shown that interactions between generalists tend to occur consistently across years and sites. However, the link between temporal and spatial interaction persistence across scales remains unclear. To address...

Ecological interactions link species in networks. Loss of species from or introduction of new species into an existing network may have substantial effects for interaction patterns. Predicting changes in interaction frequency while allowing for rewiring of existing interactions-and hence estimating the consequences of community compositional change...

Based on the conceptual framework of pollination syndromes, pollination networks should be composed of well‐delimited subgroups formed by plants that diverge in floral phenotypes and are visited by taxonomically different pollinators. Nevertheless, floral traits are not always accurate in predicting floral visitors. For instance, flowers adapted to...

Studying how habitat loss affects the tolerance of ecological networks to species extinction (i.e., their robustness) is key for our understanding of the influence of human activities on natural ecosystems. With networks typically occurring as local interaction networks interconnected in space (a meta-network), we may ask how the loss of specific h...

Most studies of plant–animal mutualistic networks have come from a temporally static perspective. This approach has revealed general patterns in network structure, but limits our ability to understand the ecological and evolutionary processes that shape these networks and to predict the consequences of natural and human‐driven disturbance on specie...

Biological invasions are a main threat to biodiversity and natural resources, which calls for studies that identify the regions that present the greatest invasion risks. We assessed the potential distribution of two non-native rose species, Rosa canina and Rosa rubiginosa, in mountain environments in mid-western Argentina, using species distributio...

Synthesis has become ubiquitous in ecology. Despite its widespread application to a broad range of research topics, it remains unclear how synthesis has affected the discipline. Using a case study of publications (n = 2304) from the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis compared with papers with similar keywords from the Web of Scie...

In semi-arid environments, the marked contrast in temperature and precipitation over the year strongly shapes ecological communities. The composition of species and their ecological interactions within a community may vary greatly over time. Although intra-annual variations are often studied, empirical information on how plant–bird relationships ar...

Niche and neutral processes jointly influence species interactions. Predictions of interactions based on these processes assume that they operate similarly across all species. However, species characteristics could systematically create differences in the strength of niche or neutral processes for each interspecific interaction. We used national‐le...

Morphology and phenology influence plant–pollinator network structure, but whether they generate more stable pairwise interactions with higher pollination success remains unknown. Here we evaluate the importance of morphological trait matching, phenological overlap and specialisation for the spatio‐temporal stability (measured as variability) of pl...

The study of mutualistic interaction networks has led to valuable insights into ecological and evolutionary processes. However, our understanding of network structure may depend upon the temporal scale at which we sample and analyze network data. To date, we lack a comprehensive assessment of the temporal scale‐dependence of network structure acros...

Population declines of pollinators constitute a major concern for the fate of biodiversity and associated ecosystem services in a context of global change. Massive declines of pollinator populations driven by habitat loss, pollution, and climate change have been reported, whose consequences at community and ecosystem levels remain elusive. We condu...

Mutualistic networks are highly dynamic, characterized by high temporal turnover of species and interactions. Yet, we have a limited understanding of how the internal structure of these networks and the roles species play in them vary through time. We used 6 years of observation data and a novel statistical method (dynamic stochastic block models)...

Plant–pollinator interactions are key for ecosystem maintenance and world crop production, and their occurrence depends on the synchronization of life-cycle events among interacting species. Phenological shifts observed for plant and pollinator species increase the risk of phenological mismatches, threatening community stability. However, the magni...

The calculation of nestedness has become a routine analysis in the study of ecological networks, as it is commonly associated with community resilience, robustness and species persistence. While meaningful in species distributional patterns, for an interaction matrix to be nested, specialist species must interact with ordered subsets of subsequentl...

We studied the realized niche of two distant allopatric wool-carder bee populations (bee-plant interaction and reproductive biology in weather variability). In one population, we analyzed the direct and indirect effects of weather on bee-resource interactions. The two populations shared several niche characteristics but showed some differences. Ant...

Although much effort has been devoted to identify plant traits related to invasiveness, the success of this approach remains elusive, likely because the relevance of particular traits for invasions is context-dependent. We studied plant invasions in the context of the recipient community in a mountain ecosystem of western Argentina by comparing tra...

Different modelling approaches have been used to relate the structure of mutualistic interactions with the stability of communities. However, inconsistencies arise when we compare modelling outcomes with the patterns of interactions observed in empirical studies. To shed light on these inconsistencies, we explored the network structure‐stability re...

The complexity of ecological systems is a major challenge for practitioners and decision-makers who work to avoid, mitigate and manage environmental change. Here, we illustrate how metaecology – the study of spatial interdependencies among ecological systems through fluxes of organisms, energy, and matter – can enhance understanding and improve man...

Under a metacommunity framework, the spatial configuration of habitat fragments could determine local community structure. Yet, quantifying fragment connectivity is challenging, as it depends on multiple variables at several geographical scales. We assessed the extent to which fragment connectivity and area explain patterns in interaction structure...

Species abundance is vulnerable to climate change and anthropogenic impact. Although numerous studies have examined the food web response to species loss, their response (e.g. in network topology and interaction frequency) to changes in species abundance has received little attention. We experimentally reduced the abundance (by c. 60%) of one host...

Abstract Plant–pollinator systems are essential for ecosystem functioning, which calls for an understanding of the determinants of their robustness to environmental threats. Previous studies considering such robustness have focused mostly on species’ connectivity properties, particularly their degree. We hypothesized that species’ phenological attr...

The complexity of ecological systems is a major challenge for practitioners and decision-makers who work to avoid, mitigate and manage environmental change. Here, we illustrate how metaecology - the study of spatial interdependencies among ecological systems through fluxes of organisms, energy, and matter - can enhance understanding and improve man...

Species invasions constitute a major and poorly understood threat to plant-pollinator systems. General theory predicting which factors drive species invasion success and subsequent effects on native ecosystems is particularly lacking. We address this problem using a consumer-resource model of adaptive behavior and population dynamics to evaluate th...

Land‐use change is known to affect biodiversity, and there is increasing concern regarding how these changes may impact the provision of ecosystem services. Although functional composition (diversity and identity) could influence ecosystem properties and services at the community level, there is little quantitative understanding of these relationsh...

Cement dust from cement plants around the world has multiple negative effects on organisms and their environment. Cement's effects come from its strongly alkaline nature and high content of heavy metals. Previous studies on plants have documented that cement dust deposition can influence plant vegetative growth, the lipid and ionic composition of t...

Ecological interactions are highly dynamic in time and space. Previous studies of plant-animal mutualistic networks have shown that the occurrence of interactions varies substantially across years. We analyzed inter-annual variation of a quantitative mutualistic network, in which links are weighted by interaction frequency. The network was sampled...

Using a total of 14,043 trap-nests (potential nest for bees), we documented the nest architecture, host plants, seasonality, and associated organisms of the following six native species of Anthidium (Megachilidae: Anthidiini) from the Central Monte Desert in Mendoza, Argentina: A. andinum Jörgensen; A. chubuti Cockerell; A. decaspilum Moure; A. fri...

Fire represents a frequent disturbance in many ecosystems, which can affect plant–pollinator assemblages and hence the services they provide. Furthermore, fire events could affect the architecture of plant–pollinator interaction networks, modifying the structure and function of communities. Some pollinators, such as wood‐nesting bees, may be partic...

The type of reproductive system may be an important trait for the establishment and maintenance of populations of invasive plant species in new areas, as it can influence their demography and genetics. We studied the breeding system of two exotic invasive species, Rosa rubiginosa and R. canina, in a natural reserve in Argentina, using a combination...

Agricultural land management modifies ecosystem structure and functioning in natural landscapes. Pollinators are a key functional group that may suffer from such intensification. Here we evaluate how agricultural land management influences the diversity of pollen transported by pollinators and the pollination niche overlap among plants. We describe...

Background: Diverse flower communities are more stable in floral resource production along the flowering season, but the question about how the diversity and stability of resources affect pollinator reproduction remains open. High plant diversity could favor short foraging trips, which in turn would enhance bee fitness. In addition to plant divers...

Spatial design of the study sites, consisting in four 8 × 20 m plots in the corners of a 100 × 200 m rectangle, and two transects of 50 × 2 m in the middle.