Ferran SayolCREAF Centre for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications | CREAF
Ferran Sayol
PhD in Ecology
About
50
Publications
19,334
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809
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Citations since 2017
Introduction
My research aims to understand how biodiversity has been originated and how it can be lost by anthropogenic impacts. I did my Ph.D. in the Autonomous University of Barcelona (2014-2018), and I have been working as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Gothenburg (2018-2020) and as a Marie-Curie Postdoc position at University College London (2020-2022). Currently, I am a Beatriu de Pinós Postdoc fellow at CREAF (Barcelona).
Additional affiliations
April 2020 - present
October 2018 - March 2020
February 2014 - August 2018
Education
February 2014 - March 2018
September 2012 - September 2013
September 2008 - July 2012
Publications
Publications (50)
Madagascar's biota is hyperdiverse and includes exceptional levels of endemicity. We review the current state of knowledge on Madagascar's past and current terrestrial and freshwater biodiversity by compiling and presenting comprehensive data on species diversity, endemism, and rates of species description and human uses, in addition to presenting...
Madagascar's unique biota is heavily affected by human activity and is under intense threat. Here, we review the current state of knowledge on the conservation status of Madagascar's terrestrial and freshwater biodiversity by presenting data and analyses on documented and predicted species-level conservation statuses, the most prevalent and relevan...
The world's islands support disproportionate levels of endemic avian biodiversity despite suffering numerous extinctions. While intensive recent research has focused on island bird conservation or extinction, few global syntheses have considered these factors together from the perspective of morphological trait diversity. Here, we provide a global...
A longstanding issue in biology is whether the intelligence of animals can be predicted by absolute or relative brain size. However, progress has been hampered by an insufficient understanding of how neuron numbers shape internal brain organization and cognitive performance. On the basis of estimations of neuron numbers for 111 bird species, we sho...
Background
Diet is a key component of a species ecological niche and plays critical roles in guiding the trajectories of evolutionary change. Previous studies suggest that dietary evolution can influence the rates and patterns of species diversification, with omnivorous (animal and plant, ‘generalist’) diets slowing down diversification compared to...
The processes that allow some lineages to diversify rapidly at a global scale remain poorly understood. Although earlier studies emphasized the importance of dispersal, global expansions expose populations to novel environments and may also require adaptation and diversification across new niches. In this study, we investigated the contributions of...
Functional traits offer a rich quantitative framework for developing and testing theories in evolutionary biology, ecology and ecosystem science. However, the potential of functional traits to drive theoretical advances and refine models of global change can only be fully realised when species-level information is complete. Here we present the AVON...
The cover image is based on the Letter AVONET: morphological, ecological and geographical data for all birds by Tobias et al., https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.13898. The sword‐billed hummingbird (Ensifera ensifera) is exquisitely adapted to its trophic niche as an aerial pollinator of flowerings plants (angiosperms) in the high Andes. A new global data...
Human impacts reshape ecological communities through the extinction and introduction of species. The combined impact of these factors depends on whether non-native species fill the functional roles of extinct species, thus buffering the loss of functional diversity. This question has been difficult to address, because comprehensive information abou...
Islands have long been recognized as key contributors to biodiversity because they facilitate geographic isolation and ecological divergence from mainland ancestors. However, island colonization has traditionally been considered an evolutionary dead-end process, and its consequences for continental biodiversity remain understudied. Here, we use the...
Human-driven extinctions can affect our understanding of evolution, through the nonrandom loss of certain types of species. Here, we explore how knowledge of a major evolutionary transition—the evolution of flightlessness in birds—is biased by anthropogenic extinctions. Adding data on 581 known anthropogenic extinctions to the extant global avifaun...
Despite their miniature brains, insects exhibit substantial variation in brain size. Although the functional significance of this variation is increasingly recognized, research on whether differences in insect brain sizes are mainly the result of constraints or selective pressures has hardly been performed. Here, we address this gap by combining pr...
• The degree of coexistence among predators can determine the structure of ecological communities. Niche partitioning is a common strategy applied by species to enhance their coexistence. Diet, habitat, or time use can be responsible for segregation among carnivore species, the latter factor being the least studied in Mediterranean ecosystems. Terr...
In his recent communication on our original paper 1,2 , D. Kelly, claiming that nutrient scarcity cannot select for masting behaviour in plants, initiated a fruitful discussion on traditionally settled hypotheses about the evolution of reproductive behaviour in plants. In his commentary, Kelly raises support for a contrasting hypothesis explaining...
Behavioural plasticity is believed to reduce species vulnerability to extinction, yet global evidence supporting this hypothesis is lacking. We address this gap by quantifying the extent to which birds are observed behaving in novel ways to obtain food in the wild; based on a unique dataset of >3,800 novel behaviours, we show that species with a hi...
Parasites can have important detrimental effects on host fitness, thereby influencing their ecology and evolution. Hosts can, in turn, exert strong selective pressures on their parasites, affecting eco-evolutionary dynamics. Although the reciprocal pressures that hosts and parasites exert on each other have long been recognized, the mechanisms are...
Urbanization is a major driver of local biodiversity losses, but the traits that determine whether species are able to tolerate urban environments remain poorly understood. Theory suggests that a larger brain should provide higher tolerance to urbanization by enhancing behavioral flexibility to cope with novel challenges. However, assembling empiri...
Mast seeding is one of the most intriguing reproductive traits in nature. Despite its potential drawbacks in terms of fitness, the widespread existence of this phenomenon suggests that it should have evolutionary advantages under certain circumstances. Using a global dataset of seed production time series for 219 plant species from all of the conti...
Anthropogenic activities and intensive farming are causing nitrate pollution in groundwater bodies. These aquifers are drained by springs which, in the Mediterranean region, act as refugia for preserving biodiversity of species that need continuous water. Some springs are also used for drinking water for wild animals, livestock and humans, so if th...
Evidence is accumulating that species traits can spur their evolutionary diversification by influencing niche shifts, range expansions, and extinction risk. Previous work has shown that larger brains (relative to body size) facilitate niche shifts and range expansions by enhancing behavioral plasticity but whether larger brains also promote evoluti...
Mosses are amongst the oldest and simplest plants, they can be found almost everywhere in the world, and they condition the structure and function of many ecosystems. Their sensitivity to environmental changes makes them very interesting subjects of study in ecology and understanding them can provide insights into the evolutionary history of plants...
Sea spray aerosol (SSA) is responsible for the large-scale transfer of particles from the sea to the land, leading to significant deposition of a range of ions, predominantly Na + , K + , Mg 2+, Ca 2+ , and Cl −. Up to now, there has been little research into the effects of SSA on spring water chemistry. Therefore, we sampled 303 semi-natural sprin...
Synopsis:
Although urbanization is a major threat to biodiversity, some species are able to thrive in cities. This might be because they have specific adaptations to urban conditions, because they are able to cope with artificial habitats in general or because they are generalists that can live in a wide range of conditions. We use the latest vers...
Theory and evidence suggest that some selective pressures are more common on islands than in adjacent mainland habitats, leading evolution to follow predictable trends. The existence of predictable evolutionary trends has nonetheless been difficult to demonstrate, mainly because of the challenge of separating in situ evolution from sorting processe...
Projecte Fonts: study of the bryophyte communities of springs
Springs are a favourable habitat for the establishment of bryophyte communities due to the constant presence of water. The objective of this project is to identify the bryophyte species that grow in springs, see if there are associations between the different species of bryophytes and c...
Bryophytes are some of the most sensitive biological indicators of environmental change. Springs have a significant presence of bryophytes and so are ideal habitats for studying their relationship with the environment. We tested whether bryophyte assemblages can be explained with macro-, meso- and micro-ecological variables (i.e. seasonal climate,...
Després de culminar 20 anys de minuciós tre-ball d'investigació amb la publicació de l'"Origen de les espècies" (On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life, en anglès; Darwin, 1859), Charles Darwin no descansa. Està determinat a adreçar tots els aspectes criticats de la teo...
Bryophytes have biological traits that make them some of the most sensitive indicators of environmental change. Springs have a significant presence of bryophytes and hence they are ideal habitats for studying their relationship with the environment. We tested whether bryophyte species richness and distribution can be predicted with macroecological...
Environmental variability has long been postulated as a major selective force in the evolution of large brains. However, assembling evidence for this hypothesis has proved difficult. Here, by combining brain size information for over 1,200 bird species with remote-sensing analyses to estimate temporal variation in ecosystem productivity, we show th...
Semi-natural springs contain complex communities of living organisms that look for constant water supplies. However, an excess of nitrate in the underlying aquifers could affect species richness, especially of those groups that are sensitive to pollution such as bryophytes (mosses and liverworts). In this study, we analyse water characteristics and...
Semi-natural springs contain complex communities of living organisms that look for constant water supplies. However, an excess of nitrate in the underlying aquifers could affect species richness, especially of those groups that are sensitive to pollution such as bryophytes (mosses and liverworts). In this study, we analyse water characteristics and...
Supplementary Figures, Supplementary Tables, Supplementary Methods and Supplementary References
List of all the species and their associated traits used in the comparative analysis. The excel file contains a sheet with the data and a sheet with a detailed description of each variable in the data. Cells with a "NA" value mean data is not available.
Despite growing interest in the evolution of enlarged brains, the biological significance of brain size variation remains controversial. Much of the controversy is over the extent to which brain structures have evolved independently of each other (mosaic evolution) or in a coordinated way (concerted evolution). If larger brains have evolved by the...
The evolutionary origin of innovativeness remains puzzling because innovating means responding to novel or unusual problems and hence is unlikely to be selected by itself. A plausible alternative is considering innovativeness as a co-opted product of traits that have evolved for other functions yet together predispose individuals to solve problems...
Projects
Projects (3)
This project aims to better understand which traits make species more vulnerable to extinction and might cause the loss of certain ecological functions. With this aim, we have compiled a list of all known extinct birds due to anthropogenic impacts, together with their morphological and ecological traits.
The life history of an organism reflects trade-offs that change the optimal combination of traits such as fecundity, survival and growth that directly links fitness and population dynamics to their environments. While life history theory has achieved important successes in predicting the response of organisms to habitat alterations, we argue here that to help develop a more predictive theory we need to advance in three insufficiently understood topics:
1) Does variation in life history affect individual fitness and population dynamics of animals in human-altered habitats?
2) Are behavioural responses part of the life history strategy of animals that successfully cope with habitat alterations?
3) How does the varying sensitivity of animals due to differences in their life history impact on the diversity and structure of communities?
We propose to address these questions in the context of agriculture and urban alterations at different levels of analyses by means of a multidisciplinary approach using a variety of avian and insect study systems. The results will contribute to reduce current discrepancies between the rates of species extinction predicted by models and the extinction rates actually recorded, as well as to inform environmental policies to mitigate the current loss of biodiversity and associated ecosystem services.
Why some animals have relatively larger brains despite its substantial energetic and developmental costs is one of the main questions in evolutionary biology. The main hypothesis to explain this paradox is that large brains can help buffering environmental variation, so it should be favourable in more changing conditions. In this project, we try to better understand which environmental and ecological factors can influence brain size evolution, mainly focusing on birds as a study model. We also study the consequences of possessing enhanced cognition abilities for the diversification os species or the tolerance to anthropogenic threats.
