Dominique Strasberg

• PhD
• Professor at University of Reunion Island

Tropical volcanic islands are biodiversity hotspots where the Critical Zone still remains poorly studied. In such steep topographic environments associated with extreme climatic events (cyclones), deployment and maintenance of monitoring equipment is challenging. While a few Critical Zone Observatories are located in tropical volcanic regions, none...

Game bird species were introduced to several insular systems during the 18th and 19th centuries. The Mascarenes are a relevant example of such introductions, including the grey francolin ( Francolinus pondicerianus ). In the case of Mauritius and Réunion Island, although this bird has been present for more than 300 years, limited information is ava...

Effective management of invasive species within protected areas requires innovative solutions. In the Mascarene's archipelago, the national park of Reunion contains the largest area of intact vegetation, which faces alarming threats from invasive alien plant species. In response, the local government initiated an inclusive partnership in 2018 invol...

Effective management of invasive species within protected areas requires innovative solutions. In the Mascarene's archipelago, the national park of Reunion contains the largest area of intact vegetation, which faces alarming threats from invasive alien plant species. In response, the local government initiated an inclusive partnership in 2018 invol...

Biological invasions represent one of the major threats to biodiversity conservation, especially in island ecosystems. Field‐based assessments of the invasion degree are required for managing and monitoring invaded habitats but there is no unifying measure available in the literature. Here, we developed a standardised method for quantifying invasio...

Tropical volcanic islands are biodiversity hotspots where the Critical Zone (CZ) still remains poorly studied. In such steep topographic environments associated with extreme climatic events (cyclones), deployment and maintenance of monitoring equipment is highly challenging. While a few Critical Zone Observatories (CZOS) are located in tropical vol...

Most tropical forests are now severely degraded and their ability to recover is highly dependent on frugivores which ensure seed dispersal for most woody plants. The global collapse of large vertebrates therefore raises major concerns about tropical forest succession, but few field studies have been conducted to disentangle recruitment limitations...

Understanding the mechanisms of biological invasions (e.g., competitive exclusion) is a key conservation challenge, especially on islands. Many mechanisms have been tested by comparing the characteristics of native and alien species, but few studies have considered ecological strategies. Here we aim at comparing the competitive ability, stress tole...

A large part of the soil protist diversity is missed in metabarcoding studies based on 0.25 g of soil environmental DNA (eDNA) and universal primers due to ca. 80 % co-amplification of non-target plants, animals and fungi. To overcome this problem, enrichment of the substrate used for eDNA extraction is an easyly implemented option but its effect h...

Biological invasions threaten biodiversity worldwide, especially on tropical Islands such as Reunion Island where the largest area of intact vegetation occurs within the Mascarene’s archipelago. With the impetus of the local government, we initiated a partnership between scientists and managers to address the management of invasive alien plant spec...

Background The root mycobiome plays a fundamental role in plant nutrition and protection against biotic and abiotic stresses. In temperate forests or meadows dominated by angiosperms, the numerous fungi involved in root symbioses are often shared between neighboring plants, thus forming complex plant-fungus interaction networks of weak specializati...

Current understanding of ecological and evolutionary processes underlying island biodiversity is heavily shaped by empirical data from plants and birds, although arthropods comprise the overwhelming majority of known animal species, and as such can provide key insights into processes governing biodiversity. Novel high throughput sequencing (HTS) ap...

The loss of large frugivores leads to seed dispersal loss and regeneration failure of numerous large-seeded trees near mother trees. Although Janzen–Connell effects are considered as the primary underlying cause, other factors remain understudied. Here, we used a field experiment to test the impact of flesh persistence on the recruitment of two lar...

Background The root mycobiome plays a fundamental role in plant nutrition and protection against biotic and abiotic stresses. In temperate forests or meadows dominated by angiosperms, the numerous fungi involved in root symbioses are often shared between neighboring plants, thus forming complex plant-fungus interaction networks of weak specializati...

Our current understanding of ecological and evolutionary processes underlying island biodiversity is heavily shaped by empirical data from plants and birds, although arthropods comprise the overwhelming majority of known animal species. This is due to inherent problems with obtaining high-quality arthropod data. Novel high throughput sequencing app...

AimsUnderstanding the contributions of abiotic and biotic conditions to soil microbial diversity, structure, and function, remains a central focus in soil biology and biogeochemistry. Here we aim to determine how geography and host plant identity influence these different components of rhizosphere bacterial communities and endosymbionts associated...

The Mascarenes are sadly famous worldwide for the massive extinction of their native vertebrates since recent human colonization. However, extinction patterns show astonishing disparities between the two main islands and between lineages of forest vertebrates. On Réunion (2,512 km², 3,070 m) where about a third of native habitats remains, most larg...

The largest area of intact vegetation in the Mascarene’s archipelago is found on Reunion Island, but the remaining natural areas are under threats. Biological invasions are one of the main threats to biodiversity loss on this island and globally worldwide. This study aimed to quantify invasion degree by alien plants species in Reunion Island. This...

Aim Biological invasions are likely determined by species dispersal strategies as well as environmental characteristics of a recipient region, especially climate and human impact. However, the contribution of climatic factors, human impact, and dispersal strategies in driving invasion processes is still controversial and not well embedded in the ex...

Biological control can be an effective conservation strategy to manage invasive species when other conventional methods cannot be implemented. Estimating the benefits of biological control for the conservation of native biodiversity remains a challenging task. Following the introduction of a defoliating sawfly, Cibdela janthina, for biological cont...

Frugivore loss has the potential to alter the regeneration of tropical hyperdiverse forests. However, no study has investigated tree diversity maintenance within old-growth protected forests on tropical oceanic islands where conservation stakes are considerable. In the Mascarenes, the largest frugivores including the Dodo went extinct after human c...

Les savanes de l'ouest réunionnais occupaient naguère un littoral peu peuplé, presque partout inculte. Éternité d'herbes sèches, elles semblaient ne changer qu'au rythme des saisons, dont elles sont, sur cette île ailleurs toujours verte, le grand horloger en titre. Mais ce littoral en marge, sur lequel elles régnaient, est aujourd'hui devenu un co...

Traditional remedies have been used for thousand years for the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases, particularly in developing countries. Of growing interest, the plant Artemisia annua, known for its malarial properties, has been studied for its numerous biological activities including metabolic, anti-tumor, anti-microbial and immunomod...

Dating recent lava flows is a critical issue to assess the volcanic hazards for nearby human populations, but traditional methods such as radiocarbon dating are often not applicable. We propose here a simple statistical method that relates the age of lava flows of the Piton de la Fournaise volcano (PdF) to the size of Agarista salicifolia (Ericacea...

Understanding how seed dispersal disruption may alter plant community diversity and dynamics over a large temporal scale remains a challenge. Here, we use a long‐term chronosequence to compare changes in the richness and composition of different dispersal trait assemblages in communities established before and after human colonization in the Mascar...

A major part of La Réunion Island has been included on the World Heritage List of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) for its unique landscapes and its outstanding biodiversity. However, there is a lack of knowledge on the arthropod diversity. For this reason, an up-to-date census of Réunion’s terrestrial a...

Habitat conservation in Grande Comore Island

Invasive alien species (IAS) are acknowledged as one of the major causes of biodiversity loss worldwide, especially in oceanic islands. In Reunion Island, pristine natural habitats cover 30% of the territory, the largest area of intact habitats in the Mascarene Archipelago. To ensure the protection of these habitats and rare species, a national par...

The largest area of intact vegetation in the Mascarene Archipelago is found on La Réunion Island. In 2007, a national park has been established where most protected habitats and rare species are targeted by some conservation actions. Invasions by exotic plants are the main threat to the biodiversity within this park and several management programs...

Together with Mauritius and Rodrigues islands, Reunion forms the Mascarene archipelago, which is included in the international biodiversity hotspot of Madagascar, a world leader in terms of both species endemism and habitat transformation. Because knowledge of Reunion's entomofauna was still incomplete or unpublished, an up-to-date census of Reunio...

Spatially driven turnover in species composition and relative abundance drives gamma diversity in all ecosystems. Assemblages of nocturnal Lepidoptera in rainforests are powerful tools for estimating and understanding this heterogeneity. There are three fundamental theoretical hypotheses for explaining this place-to-place change: neutral stochastic...

Almost half of Reunion Island is protected by a national park and included on the UNESCO World Heritage List for its unique biodiversity. Arthropods, mainly insects, represent two thirds of biodiversity worldwide, and very likely on Reunion, and more than 75% of the animal diversity in nonmarine ecosystems. Moreover, 31% of Reunion's arthropod spec...

Understanding patterns of community structure and the causes for their variation can be furthered by comparative biogeographic analyses of island biotas. We used woody plant data at the local scale to investigate variations in species rarity, alpha, beta, and gamma diversity within and between three islands from the oceanic archipelagoes of Azores,...

Islands harbour evolutionary and ecologically unique biota, which are currently disproportionately threatened by a multitude of anthropogenic factors, including habitat loss, invasive species and climate change. Native forests on oceanic islands are important refugia for endemic species, many of which are rare and highly threatened. Long-term monit...

Question The composition of fruit types, fleshy vs dry fruits, greatly influences the functioning of plant communities. Literature documenting spatial patterns of fruit types at fine scale is abundant. However, studies at larger geographical scale remain scarce, especially on high‐elevation oceanic islands that provide a great environmental heterog...

The 11 French Overseas tropical island territories, located in three oceans (Atlantic, Indian and Pacific), harbored a high species and habitat diversity on small terrestrial areas. Indeed, these islands comprise 70% of the 17,947 endemic plant and animal species known in France on an area of only 4 % of the French nation. This “mega-biological” di...

Natural recolonization of disturbed environments is a key issue for the maintenance of biodiversity, especially in a context of habitats threatened by exotic species. Recolonization by collembola of habitats destroyed by lava flows has never been documented. These soil-dwelling arthropods provide an essential basis for the functioning of terrestria...

Human-wildlife conflicts pose a growing threat to many species worldwide and require increasingly innovative and multi-disciplinary resolutions. Because of their apparent simplicity and political appeal, lethal approaches like culling are often favoured, decisions to cull are typically poorly supported by scientific evidence and the limitations and...

The mistletoe Bakerella hoyifolia subsp. bojeri (Baker) Balle was presumed extinct from Reunion Island, where it is native, for over 50 years. We recently found B. hoyifolia plants in a well-preserved forest stand in the southeastern part of the island. The small population consists of six individuals, distributed in two groups, ca. 50 m apart, gro...

Epiphytes in tropical montane cloud forests (TMCF) intercept atmospheric water and, as a result, form a vital part of the hydrological cycle of this ecosystem. Our study investigates the role of bryophytes in such systems on La Réunion Island (Mascarenes). To better understand ecohydrological functioning of the forest, we investigated cloud water i...

Using a series of standardised sampling plots within forest ecosystems in remote oceanic islands, we reveal fundamental differences between the structuring of aboveground and belowground arthropod biodiversity that are likely due to large-scale species introductions by humans. Species of beetle and spider were sampled almost exclusively from single...

Question How did the native and alien woody plant communities of protected lowland wet forests of a tropical oceanic island change in the presence of understorey invasive alien plants over the medium (21–27 yrs) and longer term (68 yrs)? Location Bel Ombre, Brise Fer and Macchabé forests in the Black River Gorges National Park ( BRGNP ), Mauritius...

Obtaining fundamental biodiversity metrics such as alpha, beta and gamma diversity for arthropods is often complicated by a lack of prior taxonomic information and/or taxonomic expertise, which can result in unreliable morphologically based estimates. We provide a set of standardized ecological and molecular sampling protocols that can be employed...

Novel species of fungi described in the present study include the following from Australia: Vermiculariopsiella eucalypti, Mulderomyces natalis (incl. Mulderomyces gen. nov.), Fusicladium paraamoenum, Neotrimmatostroma paraexcentricum, and Pseudophloeospora eucalyptorum on leaves of Eucalyptus spp., Anungitea grevilleae (on leaves of Grevillea sp.)...

Aim Higher‐elevation areas on islands and continental mountains tend to be separated by longer distances, predicting higher endemism at higher elevations; our study is the first to test the generality of the predicted pattern. We also compare it empirically with contrasting expectations from hypotheses invoking higher speciation with area, temperat...

Novel species of fungi described in the present study include the following from Australia: Vermiculariopsiella eucalypti, Mulderomyces natalis (incl. Mulderomyces gen. nov.), Fusicladium paraamoenum, Neotrimmatostroma paraexcentricum, and Pseudophloeospora eucalyptorum on leaves of Eucalyptus spp., Anungitea grevilleae (on leaves of Grevillea sp.)...

Recent theory suggests that the geographic location of island radiations (local accumulation of species diversity due to cladogenesis) can be predicted based on island area and isolation. Crickets are a suitable group for testing these predictions, as they show both the ability to reach some of the most isolated islands in the world, and to speciat...

Community ecology aims at understanding how species assemble and coexist in relation with the biotic and abiotic environment. Ecological communities are traditionally identified through a multitude of methods, from classification by hand to refined statistical methods based on similarity indices and clustering methods. A recent review concluded tha...

From an unprecedented experiment using airborne measurements performed over the rich forests of Réunion Island, this paper aims to present a methodology for the classification of diverse tropical forest biomes as retrieved from vertical profiles measured using a full-waveform LiDAR. This objective is met through the retrieval of both the canopy hei...

Novel species of fungi described in the present study include the following from Australia: Neoseptorioides eucalypti gen. & sp. nov. from Eucalyptus radiata leaves, Phytophthora gondwanensis from soil, Diaporthe tulliensis from rotted stem ends of Theobroma cacao fruit, Diaporthe vawdreyi from fruit rot of Psidium guajava, Magnaporthiopsis agrosti...

Novel species of fungi described in the present study include the following from Australia: Neoseptorioides eucalypti gen. & sp. nov. from Eucalyptus radiata leaves, Phytophthora gondwanensis from soil, Diaporthe tulliensis from rotted stem ends of Theobroma cacao fruit, Diaporthe vawdreyi from fruit rot of Psidium guajava, Magnaporthiopsis agrosti...

The study of islands as model systems has played an important role in the development of evolutionary and ecological theory. The 50th anniversary of MacArthur and Wilson's (December 1963) article, ‘An equilibrium theory of insular zoogeography’, was a recent milestone for this theme. Since 1963, island systems have provided new insights into the fo...

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http://www.cnrs.fr/fr/pdf/inee/prospective-eco-tropicale/#/1/

Despite the normally strong link between geographic proximity and relatedness of recently diverged taxa, truly puzzling biogeographic anomalies to this expectation exist in nature. Using a dated phylogeny, population genetic structure and estimates of ecological niche overlap, we tested the hypothesis that two geographically very disjunct, but morp...

Invasive plants can alter community dynamics and the successional trajectories of ecosystems they colonize. We explore how interactions between disturbance and invasion govern successional trajectories in the case of Casuarina equisetifolia invading lava flows on La Réunion Island. Surveys from 1972 and 1990 were compared with results of a survey i...

Aim We examined phylogenetic relationships and spatio‐temporal diversification in Indian Ocean Primulaceae, assessing correlations between speciation rates, geographical expansion and ecomorphological specialization. Location Madagascar and Indian Ocean Islands. Methods We conducted phylogenetic analyses with plastid and nuclear DNA sequences of...

[This corrects the article on p. e42932 in vol. 7.].

The phytophagous beetle family Curculionidae is the most species-rich insect family known, with much of this diversity having been attributed to both co-evolution with food plants and host shifts at key points within the early evolutionary history of the group. Less well understood is the extent to which patterns of host use vary within or among re...

Multi-decadal declines in tree density and species richness as alien plants invade a tropical island's protected wet forests Invasive alien species (IAS) cause major environmental damage while also representing a main and worsening threat to biodiversity throughout the tropics. The detrimental impacts of IAS appear to be most serious in inter-troph...

Mimusops balata (Sapotaceae) is an endemic tree species from La Réunion and Mauritius. Like many species growing in lowland forests in La Réunion, it has suffered from human disturbances. We developed twelve microsatellite markers for M. balata and tested cross-amplification in five other Mimusops species to have powerful tools for genetic diversit...

A preliminary regional IUCN Red List for liverworts and hornworts is provided for Réunion (Mascarene archipelago), in accordance with the IUCN Red List criteria 3.1. A total of 327 species were assessed of which one species (Bryopteris gaudichaudii Gottsche) is considered to be regionally extinct (RE), fourteen species categorised as critically end...

Madagascar is surrounded by archipelagos varying widely in origin, age and structure. Although small and geologically young, these archipelagos have accumulated disproportionate numbers of unique lineages in comparison to Madagascar, highlighting the role of waif-dispersal and rapid in situ diversification processes in generating endemic biodiversi...

Primer pairs used in this study. (DOC)

Calibration scheme and results of molecular dating analyses for selected nodes using Penalized Likelihood and BEAST. Notes: Values in millions of years ago. Abbreviations: HPD – Highest Posterior Density interval; (logN) – logNormal prior; (N) – Normal prior; PL – Penalized Likelihood; PP – Posterior Probability; UCLN – uncorrelated lognormal; (U)...

Specimens, voucher information and GenBank accessions. Notes: Classifications of the Flore des Mascareignes [109] and Madagascar Catalogue [112] are followed. Leaf samples and collections obtained from field (Toulouse DNA-bank (TDNA)), the DNA Bank at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (KDB), SANBI at Kirstenbosch (LHMS), or from GenBank (GB). For taxa obt...

DNA isolation, purification and PCR conditions. Notes: Total DNA was isolated using the BioSprint DNA Plant Kit (Qiagen, Valencia, CA) with a modified protocol, using ball bearings and silica powder. All markers were amplified from genomic DNA using PCR. Each 25 µl reaction contained 0.1 µl (5.0 units) of GoTaq polymerase (Promega, Madison, WI), 5...

Inferred ancestral ranges for branches (separated by vertical bar) descending from each node in Figure 2, and their relative probability. Note: Only alternative scenarios that fall within two log-likelihood units of the optimal reconstruction and have a relative probability ≥0.1 are provided. Asterisks highlight nodes for which multiple equally pro...

Bayesian 50% majority rule consensus tree with associated branch lengths. Notes: Branch labels indicate maximum likelihood bootstrap values followed by Bayesian posterior probabilities (in bold) from MrBayes. Circles indicate support for resolved nodes, as opposed to a polytomy, estimated by PHYCAS (black: 0.91–100; blue: 0.76–0.90; open: 0.60–0.75...

This updated checklist of the bryophytes of Madagascar was compiled from the literature, herbarium and recent collections. A total of 1144 species and infraspecific taxa are recorded for Madagascar composed of 751 mosses, 390 liverworts and 3 hornworts. 28.67% of the species reported for the Island are endemics. Twenty-four taxa are newly recorded...

With 14 species, Badula (Primulaceae) is the most species-rich endemic angiosperm genus of the Mascarene Archipelago. The relationship between Badula and its ally Oncostemum (c. 100 spp; Madagascar and the Comoros Islands) is uncertain, with implications for the circumscription of Badula as a Mascarene endemic. Within Badula, species rarity (severa...

Mauritius, a 1,865 km2 oceanic island within the Madagascar and Indian Ocean islands biodiversity hotspot may be regarded as reflecting what awaits many tropical oceanic islands owing to the extreme levels of transformation resulting from over 370 years of human presence. The island has an urgent need to conserve its surviving remnants of native te...

While reinforcement may play a role in all major modes of speciation, relatively little is known about the timescale over which species hybridize without evolving complete reproductive isolation. Birds have high potential for hybridization, and islands provide simple settings for uncovering speciation and hybridization patterns. Here we develop a p...