
Edgar J GonzálezNational Autonomous University of Mexico | UNAM · Department of Ecology and Natural Resources
Edgar J González
PhD
Looking for collaborations and feedback =)
About
60
Publications
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Introduction
I am a quantitative ecologist. My main focus has been on population ecology, where I have focused on developing statistical methods to study the dynamics of structured populations. I am also interested in applying my skills in other areas of ecology and thus I have collaborated in projects on spatial and community ecology, sustainability assessment and systematic reviews.
Publications
Publications (60)
Frequently, vital rates are driven by directional, long-term environmental changes. Many of these are of great importance, such as land degradation, climate change, and succession. Traditional demographic methods assume a constant or stationary environment, and thus are inappropriate to analyze populations subject to these changes. They also requir...
1. Integral projection models (IPMs) allow us to describe quantitatively the dynamics of a population structured by a continuous variable. They rely on information gathered at the individual level by recording survival, repro- duction and changes in some structuring variable over time. This requires the ability to track individuals over the course...
Sex in crocodilians is not determined by chromosomes, but by egg incubation temperature, where different temperatures produce different clutch sex ratios. Two patterns have been proposed to describe these changes in sex ratios: a 100% female proportion at low and high temperatures with male predominance at intermediate ones (FMF) or a simpler patte...
Integral projection models (IPMs) allow projecting the behaviour of a population over time using information on the vital processes of individuals, their state and that of the environment they inhabit. As with matrix population models (MPMs), time is treated as a discrete variable, but in IPMs state and environmental variables are continuous, and a...
Globally, around half of all tropical forests are secondary communities which are recovering from previous disturbances. In these communities, dominant pioneers play a critical role in the successional dynamics due their ability to modify the environment, and thus to facilitate or hinder the performance of other species. In this study, we examined...
Plant species diversity is key to ecosystem functioning, but in recent decades anthropogenic activities have prompted an alarming decline in this community trait. Thus, developing strategies to understand diversity dynamics based on affordable and efficient remote sensing monitoring is essential, as well as examining the relevance of spatial scale...
Background and Aims
Climate change is a global phenomenon affecting species, which in arid regions will translate into more frequent and intense periods of drought. The Sonoran Desert is becoming hotter and drier, and many organisms are rapidly changing in abundance and distribution. These population attributes depend directly on the dynamics of th...
The availability of high-resolution satellite imagery has boosted the modelling of tropical forest attributes based on texture metrics derived from grey-level co-occurrence matrices (GLCMs). This procedure has shown that GLCM metrics are good predictors of vegetation attributes. Nonetheless, the procedure is also sensitive to the scale of analysis...
Globally, around half of all tropical forests are secondary communities which are recovering from previous disturbances. In these communities, dominant pioneers play a critical role in the successional dynamics due their ability to modify the environment, and thus to facilitate or hinder the performance of other species. In this study, we examined...
Data integration allows obtaining better descriptions and forecasting of a population’s behaviour by incorporating data at both the individual and population levels. Structured population models include the matrix population models (MPMs), which structure a population through a discrete state variable, and the integral population models (IPMs), whi...
Beta-diversity is a term used to refer to the heterogeneity in the composition of species through space or time. Despite a consensus on the advantages of measuring β-diversity using data on species abundances through Hill numbers, we still lack a measure of temporal β-diversity based on this framework. In this paper, we present the mathematical bas...
Key message
Analysis of wood anatomical traits revealed that drought tolerance predominates in early-successional communities, and vessel variability is relevant for species’ ecological success in seasonally dry tropical environments.
Abstract
Successional tropical dry forests harbor a diverse array of species subjected to a strong seasonal precip...
Mexico harbors over 50% of maize's genetic diversity in the Americas. Native maize varieties are actively managed by small-scale producers within a diverse array of cultivation systems. Seed lot use, exchange and admixture has consequences for the in situ conservation of such varieties. Here we analyze native maize seed management dynamics from 906...
The effects of anthropogenic disturbances on the structure and function of seasonally dry tropical forests (SDTFs) are mediated both by disturbance type and intensity, and the environmental conditions, including climate. In a climate change scenario, the interaction between low water availability and chronic anthropogenic disturbances may potential...
Understanding the mechanisms that allow the permanence of coral reefs and the constancy of their characteristics is necessary to alleviate the effects of chronic environmental changes. After a disturbance, healthy coral reefs display trajectories that allow regaining coral cover and the establishment of framework building corals. Through a comparat...
Mexico is the center of origin of maize and one of the phenomena that imperil maize conservation is transgene presence. Although previous studies have documented transgene presence in Mexican landraces, to date there is no countrywide transgene monitoring protocol, nor systematic analyses assessing which factors could be related with transgene pres...
Successional tropical dry forest (TDF) species face water scarcity in the harsh dry season. Wood features provide insight into potential hydraulic stress coping mechanisms. Here, we describe the wood anatomy of 13 species occurring frequently in successional TDF. Given the marked rainfall seasonality of TDF, we expected these species to share consp...
Background
Despite the great concern triggered by the environmental crisis worldwide, the loss of temporal key functions and processes involved in biodiversity maintenance has received little attention. Species are restricted in their life cycles by environmental variables because of their physiological and behavioral properties; thus, the timing a...
As urbanization proceeds, natural ecosystems surrounding cities are transformed, but usually some elements persist, notably trees from forest ecosystems. However, it is still unknown the extent to which isolated trees, immersed in an urban matrix, maintain their interactions with insects that feed on their seeds. In this work we analyzed pre-disper...
Citation: López-Martínez, J.O.; Vargas-Larreta, B.; González, E.J.; Corral-Rivas, J.J.; Aguirre-Calderón, O.A.; Treviño-Garza, E.J.; De los Santos-Posadas, H.M.; Martínez-Salvador, M.; Zamudio-Sánchez, F.J.; Aguirre-Calderón, C.G. Forest Biometric Systems in Mexico: A Systematic Review of Available Models. Forests 2022, 13, 649.
The great phenological diversification characteristic of seasonally dry tropical forests (SDTF) suggests that these patterns result from a complex interplay between exogenous (e.g., climatic) and endogenous (e.g., morphological, physiological, anatomical) factors. Based on the well‐established relationships of wood density with water‐storing capaci...
Demography is everywhere in our lives: from birth to death. Demography shapes our daily decisions, as well as the decisions that others make on us (e.g. bank loans, retirement age). Demography is everywhere across the Tree of Life. The universal currencies of demography—survival, development, reproduction, and recruitment—shape the performance of a...
Engineering resilience, a forest's ability to maintain its properties in the event of disturbance, comprises two components: resistance and recovery. In human‐dominated landscapes, forest resilience depends mostly on recovery. Forest recovery largely depends on autogenic regulation, which entails a negative feedback loop between rates of change in...
Each year, an individual mature large saguaro cactus produces about one million seeds in attractive juicy fruits that lure seed predators and seed dispersers to a 3‐month feast. From the million seeds produced, however, only a few will persist into mature saguaros. A century of research on saguaro population dynamics has led to the conclusion that...
Background: Despite long-lasting efforts to disentangle the drivers of orchid pollination, pollination success in tropical dry forest orchids remains largely unknown.
Questions and hypothesis: How successful are pollination in three tropical dry forest orchids? How is pollination influenced by floral display and floral rewards (as suggested by flo...
Background
Studies on the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem productivity have suggested that species richness and functional diversity are the main drivers of ecosystem processes. Several patterns on this relationship have been found, including positive, unimodal, negative, and neutral trends, keeping the issue controversial. In this...
Montane ecosystems occur throughout the world, and harbor many endemic species. They also provide key ecological services, including the catchment of water resources and the storage of organic carbon. These ecosystems are vulnerable to global climate change and increasing human pressures, including forestry and their conversion to arable land. In t...
A presentation of the temperature-dependent sex-determination patterns in crocodiles determined from a systematic review and integration of available data.
Some of the research I've been working on recently.
Background: Studies on the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem productivity have suggested that species richness and functional diversity are the main drivers of ecosystem processes. Several patterns on this relationship have been found, including positive, unimodal, negative, and neutral trends, keeping the issue controversial. In this...
Background: Studies on the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem productivity have suggested that species richness and functional diversity are the main drivers of ecosystem processes. Several patterns on this relationship have been found, including positive, unimodal, negative, and neutral trends, keeping the issue controversial. In this...
Scorpions have high levels of endemism and their distributions are typically narrow, making them particularly vulnerable to changes in their environment. Unfortunately, little is known about the status of scorpion conservation worldwide. Here, we compiled information on scorpion diversity across the world and highlighted Mexican scorpion diversity....
Population projections coupled with downscaled climate projections are a powerful tool that allows predicting future population dynamics of vulnerable plants in the face of a changing climate. Traditional approaches used to predict the vulnerability of plants to climate change (e.g. species distribution models) fail to mechanistically describe the...
Environmental restrictions faced by successional species (those occurring in recovering vegetation) change gradually between early and late succession. In tropical dry forest (TDF), legume species dominate early succession, i.e. accumulate more biomass than coexisting species, but later are gradually replaced by late successional species. Stem anat...
A major obstacle faced by reforestation/restoration programs is an insufficient supply of high-quality seed. Seed collection is commonly based on opportunistic strategies that only consider availability and distance to seed sources, but not seed quality. Although for commercial timber species from temperate ecosystems the selection of individuals w...
Despite the recent rapid growth of tropical dry forest succession ecology, most studies on this topic have focused on plant community attribute recovery, whereas animal community successional dynamics has been largely overlooked, and the few existing studies have used taxonomic approaches. Here, we analyze the successional changes in the bee commun...
Several remote sensing proxies, such as image texture, have been used to describe the spatial variation of different tropical forest’s attributes at medium scales. Fourier transformed ordination (FOTO) and gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) are two texture methods fre- quently used in these studies but seldom compared. Therefore, the objective...
Barkeria whartoniana is an epiphytic, microendemic orchid of southern Mexico. This species exclusively inhabits limestone outcrops within a tropical dry forest in Oaxaca State, and its current population size is very small. The goals of this study were to characterize its phorophyte preference, and to assess the success of the experimental reintrod...
Despite its importance for carbon storage and other ecosystem functions, the variation in vegetation canopy height is not yet well understood. We examined the relationship between this community attribute and environmental heterogeneity in a tropical dry forest of southern Mexico. We sampled vegetation in 15 sites along a 100-km coastal stretch of...
The understanding of how long-term environmental change affects the population dynamics of species has been a recurrent question in population ecology. Examples of such changes include land degradation, climate change, and secondary succession. In this latter process, species have been traditionally assigned to either the pioneer or the late-growth...
Interspecific interactions have a fundamental role in plant population dynamics, as they may set the conditions for species coexistence. Parasitic plants, like dwarf mistletoes, offer the opportunity to study competition for resources that are different from those consumed by most plants, allowing for a better understanding of the interaction.
We e...
Old-growth tropical forests are increasingly vanishing worldwide. Although the accurate quantification of tropical old-growth forests attributes is essential to understand, manage, and conserve their high diversity and biomass, conducting this task over large areas and at fine detail is not only expensive and time consuming, but also often practica...
Google Earth provides a freely available, global mosaic of high-resolution imagery from different sensors that has become popular in environmental and ecological studies. However, such imagery lacks the near-infrared band often used in studying vegetation, thus its potential for estimating vegetation properties remains unclear. In this study, we as...
Population dynamics of many species vary according to continuous variables such as size or age, i.e. the vital rates (survival, growth and reproduction) of its members differ depending on their particular characteristics. To account for this, integral projection models (IPMs; Easterling et al. 2000) model each vital rate as a function of these vari...
100th ESA meeting presentation, Baltimore, MA, USA, 20150811
Analyses of the geographic patterns of wild species abundance have been carried out in studies ranging from those interested in hot-spots for biodiversity and conservation to basic ecological analyses. Based on the methodological approaches used, the present study searched for areas of higher yield among native races of maize in Mexico, its centre...
Ecological restoration has become an important technique for mitigating the human impacts on natural vegetation. Planting seedlings is the most common approach to regain lost forest cover. However, these activities require a large economic investment. Direct-seeding is considered a cheaper and easier alternative technique, in which tree seeds are i...
Food security is a key topic for human welfare worldwide. In this context, the agrobiodiversity in centers
of origin and diversification (COD) for the world’s staple crops will be critical for feeding the world under
changing environmental and social conditions. Maize is one of the most widely cultivated cereal and is the
staple food for African and...
The identification of the demographic processes responsible for the decline in population growth rate (λ) in disturbed areas would allow conservation efforts to be efficiently directed. Integral projection models (IPMs) are used for this purpose, but it is unclear whether the conclusions drawn from their analysis are sensitive to how functional str...
Biodiversity conservation and ecosystem-service provision will increasingly depend on the existence of secondary vegetation. Our success in achieving these goals will be determined by our ability to accurately estimate the structure and diversity of such communities at broad geographic scales. We examined whether the texture (the spatial variation...
Best descriptive and predictive linear models for vegetation attributes as a function of one, two and three textural variables (TV). See Table 1 for vegetational attributes abbreviations. IR: near infra-red band, RED: red band, NDVI: Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, EVI: Enhanced Vegetation Index. See Table 3 for the description of textural...
Within-site variability for vegetational variables. See Table 1 for vegetational attributes abbreviations and units of measurement. SE: Standard error. M: mature forest.
(XLS)
Canopy trees are largely responsible for the environmental heterogeneity in the understory of tropical and subtropical species-rich forests, which in turn may influence sapling community dynamics. We tested the effect of the specific identity of four cloud forest canopy trees on total solar radiation, canopy openness, soil moisture, litter depth, a...
El estudio de la dinámica poblacional de las cactáceas globosas ha sido una actividad relativamente reciente que usualmente ha utilizado como herramienta matemática a los modelos matriciales de proyección para obtener información relevante sobre estas especies. Sin embargo, dichos modelos presentan ciertos problemas a la hora de modelar especies es...