Jaime Martínez-Valderrama

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Verified

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• PhD in Agricultural Engeneering
• Tenured scientist at Spanish National Research Council

Drosophila suzukii is an invasive pest that poses a significant threat to fruit crops worldwide, leading to considerable agricultural losses and economic damage. Unlike chemical control measures against D. suzukii, integrating insect-proof nets within an IPM framework offers a more sustainable solution. This study evaluates the efficacy of nine com...

This paper presents an integrated modelling assessment that estimated the sensitivities of five endogenous factors in commercial rangelands, i.e. number of active farmers, profits, stocking rate, standing herbage biomass, and soil erosion, to the same percentage variation in 70 factors, including economic and climate drivers. The assessment utilise...

Monitoring river connectivity across large regions is essential for understanding hydrological processes and environmental management. However, comprehensive assessments of river connectivity are often hindered by inaccurate dam databases, which are biased towards larger dams while overlooking smaller or low‐head dams. To enhance the accuracy of ri...

Body size rules the distribution and abundance of species, affecting the composition of animal communities. Body size distributions may explain niche partitioning and have been used to quantify the relative resilience of communities to perturbations. Five hypotheses have been put forward to explain observed body mass patterns in animal communities...

Increases in the abundance of woody species have been reported to affect the provisioning of ecosystem services in drylands worldwide. However, it is virtually unknown how multiple biotic and abiotic drivers, such as climate, grazing, and fire, interact to determine woody dominance across global drylands. We conducted a standardized field survey in...

Earth harbours an extraordinary plant phenotypic diversity¹ that is at risk from ongoing global changes2,3. However, it remains unknown how increasing aridity and livestock grazing pressure—two major drivers of global change4–6—shape the trait covariation that underlies plant phenotypic diversity1,7. Here we assessed how covariation among 20 chemic...

Ecological restoration is imperative for controlling desertification. Potential natural vegetation (PNV), the theoretical vegetation succession state, can guides near-natural restoration. Although a rising transition from traditional statistical methods to advanced machine learning and deep learning is observed in PNV simulation, a comprehensive co...

Mineral-associated organic carbon (MAOC) constitutes a major fraction of global soil carbon and is assumed less sensitive to climate than particulate organic carbon (POC) due to protection by minerals. Despite its importance for long-term carbon storage, the response of MAOC to changing climates in drylands, which cover more than 40% of the global...

Perennial plants create productive and biodiverse hotspots, known as fertile islands, beneath their canopies. These hotspots largely determine the structure and functioning of drylands worldwide. Despite their ubiquity, the factors controlling fertile islands under conditions of contrasting grazing by livestock, the most prevalent land use in dryla...

Las zonas áridas ocupan casi la mitad de la superficie de la Tierra. Su peculiar régimen hidrológico hace del agua su principal factor limitante, junto con otras señas de identidad propias de estas regiones, como las adaptaciones morfológicas y funcionales de su fauna y flora, y las culturales y sociales de sus más de 2.000 millones de habitantes,...

The future of water resources relies heavily on food production. Large-scale agriculture, driven by irrigation technology and cost reduction, has transformed traditional dryland croplands into a very profitable but environmentally and socially impactful agribusiness. The study of groundwater-dependent food systems is fragmented. Hydrology, on one h...

Fairy circles (FCs) are regular vegetation patterns found in drylands of Namibia and Western Australia. It is virtually unknown whether they are also present in other regions of the world and which environmental factors determine their distribution. We conducted a global systematic survey and found FC-like vegetation patterns in 263 sites from 15 c...

Desertification mapping is the first step in tackling this important problem. The failure of mapping to date creates a research gap that needs to be addressed as soon as possible.

To meet population growth, the excessive abstraction of water resources for irrigating water-intensive crops has become an increasing crisis in arid regions of Northwest China. This contains the perennial contradiction between development and desertification, typical of drylands, which we also find within the United Nations Convention to combat Des...

The divergence between agricultural water use and the annual supply of water resources (water gap) has been increasing for decades. The forecast is that this water gap will continue to widen, compromising the water security of a large share of the global population. On the one hand, the increase in demand is attributed to an ever-growing population...

Simple Summary The Sahara desert is home to the greatest diversity of ungulates of all deserts. In this harsh environment, the endangered Cuvier’s gazelle finds at the southernmost limit of its distribution a key population for its survival. A better understanding of the feeding ecology of the species may improve our understanding of the biological...

Surveys based on indirect signs and camera trapping are two non-invasive methods extensively used for monitoring elusive mammals. Both approaches can be useful to obtain key information on wildlife in remote areas, since they may allow for the logistically viable design of optimal field frameworks. The sand cat (Felis margarita) is a feline that in...

Desertification is the degradation of drylands, which occupy an increasing proportion of the Earth's surface due to global warming. It is currently the most extensive biome on Earth, occupying 45% and one out of every three inhabitants of the planet live in them. One of the most effective ways to face desertification, as Land Degradation Neutrality...

La desertificación, un problema de largo alcance. Las tierras secas del planeta ya ocupan el 45% de la superficie terrestre, y en ellas vive un tercio de la población mundial (UNCCD, 2022a). La desertificación es la degradación de estas tie-rras, como consecuencia de variaciones climáti-cas y actividades humanas, entendiendo por de-gradación la pér...

Rangelands are a key resource present all over the world and cover half of all emerged lands. They are even more important in drylands, where they cover 48% of the total area. Their intensification and the additional pressure added by climate change push these socio-ecological systems towards desertification. Over the last two decades, we have deve...

Rangelands are a key resource present all over the world as it covers half of the emerged lands. They are even more important in drylands, where they cover 48% of the total area. Intensification and the additional pressure added by climate change push these systems towards desertification. Over the last two decades, we have developed and applied Sy...

Grazing represents the most extensive use of land worldwide. Yet its impacts on ecosystem services remain uncertain because pervasive interactions between grazing pressure, climate, soil properties, and biodiversity may occur but have never been addressed simultaneously. Using a standardized survey at 98 sites across six continents, we show that in...

Grazing represents the most extensive use of land worldwide. Yet its impacts on ecosystem services remain uncertain because pervasive interactions between grazing pressure, climate, soil properties, and biodiversity may occur but have never been addressed simultaneously. Using a standardized survey at 98 sites across six continents, we show that in...

Groundwater degradation is a major issue on an increasingly hot and thirsty planet. The problem is critical in drylands, where recharge rates are low and groundwater is the only reliable resource in a context of water scarcity and stress. Aquifer depletion and contamination is a process of desertification. Land Degradation Neutrality is regarded as...

Knowing the extent and environmental drivers of forests is key to successfully restore degraded ecosystems, and to mitigate climate change and desertification impacts using tree planting. Water availability is the main limiting factor for the development of forests in drylands, yet the importance of groundwater resources and palaeoclimate as driver...

Groundwater degradation is a global problem linked to irrigation agriculture and aggravated by climate change. In drylands, where aquifer recharge is low, irrigation has emerged as an engine of economic growth. This problem falls under the paradigm of desertification, as it fits the definition of this complex problem in that the degradation of dryl...

We explored the relative importance of climate oscillations and human‐driven disturbances on the change in vegetation biomass in agroecosystems, and whether it is associated with land use. Our main contribution is a quantitative treatment of these factors in equivalent terms, i.e. not assuming any of them to be principal. The study was carried out...

Hyper-arid, arid, semi-arid and dry-sub-humid climate zones (all of them considered drylands) occupy over 40 % of the Earth’s land surface and are home to more than 2 billion people. Contrary to the popular image of this important set of biomes, drylands are home to 36 % of carbon stores, 30 % of forested areas, 50 % of the world’s livestock, and 4...

Drylands occupy approximately 40 % of the Earth's surface. Their peculiar hydrological regime, with water as the main limiting factor, together with other characteristics, such as the variability of rainfall and their ecological heterogeneity, turn these regions into one of the main and most relevant sets of biomes on the planet. Beyond their stere...

The latest world atlas of desertification represents a turning point in the diagnosis of desertification. While it forgoes desertification mapping due to the intrinsic complexity of the phenomenon and the impossibility of measuring it using a single indicator, it introduces the convergence of evidence paradigm, which identifies socioeconomic and bi...

The latest World Atlas of Desertification represents a turning point in the diagnosis of desertification. While it forgoes desertification mapping due to the intrinsic complexity of the phenomenon and the impossibility of measuring it using a single indicator, it introduces the Convergence of Evidence paradigm, which identifies socioeconomic and bi...

We explored the relative importance of climate oscillations and human-driven disturbances on the change of vegetation biomass in agroecosystems, and whether it is associated with land use. The study was carried out in the drylands of the Iberian Peninsula, NW Maghreb, Palestinian West Bank, Mozambique, China and NE Brazil, using satellite time-seri...

Desertification is a complex and multi-faceted phenomenon. There have been many attempts to map it. However, none of the approaches used over the years has been consolidated, and the criteria and methodologies have changed over the years. This lack of robustness makes the interpretation of these maps confusing and not very operational. In this pape...

Desertification is a global problem affecting 1.5 billion people living in the poorest and most vulnerable parts of the world. In recent years, several studies have contributed to provide information to assess the problem. Some of them are based on analysing biophysical and socio-economic variables using artificial intelligence techniques. For exam...

Las tierras secas, que engloban todas aquellas con un índice de aridez (relación entre precipitación y evapotranspiración potencial) inferior a 0.65, constituyen el principal bioma terrestre, ocupando entre el 37.2% (Cherlet et al. 2018) y el 46.2% (Mirzabaev et. al 2019) de su superficie. En ellas vive el 40% de la población mundial (van der Esch...

La desertificación es un proceso complejo y contraintuitivo cuyo estudio demanda un enfoque multidisciplinar. Ello la convierte en un campo de investigación ideal sobre el que aplicar la Dinámica de Sistemas (DS). Se trata de una metodología de construcción de modelos dinámicos de simulación por ordenador que se concibe como herramienta de apoyo pa...

Dear Colleagues, This Special Issue aims to compile experiences that present this type of tools and proposals, including theoretical approaches and conceptualizations, numerical modelling tools and codes, and applications to case studies. The multidisciplinary and integrative character will be one of the most appreciated hallmarks of this proposal...

Dear Colleagues, This Special Issue is looking for original research exploring global driving forces and human activities determining the sustainability of coastal aquifers, including but not limited to: - Hydrological studies aimed at conceptualizing aquifer functioning and assessing the groundwater resource quantity and quality (e.g., geological,...

This special issue delivers a platform in which researchers expose intersections between algorithm design, software platforms, and hardware architectures to deal with emerging challenges in the scientific field of management of water and water-dependent resources. Since the call for papers was announced in June 2019, this special issue has received...

This essay approaches land degradation by targeting its ultimate thermodynamic causes, rather than its immediate environmental consequences. The objective is to make some propositions that could help understand the essence of the process, and contribute to a theoretical framework to be developed. These propositions are: 1. Human populations are an...

Rangeland productivity is strongly conditioned by the amount and temporal distribution of precipitation. Thus, the worsening of droughts with climate change could be a serious threat to their existence. This paper presents a modelling study aimed at evaluating the sensitivity of a valuable type of commercial rangelands, namely Spanish dehesas, to i...

Distribution area and surface are both parameters of paramount importance for habitat management, monitoring and conservation. Here we present the distribution of eight zonal forest types of mainland Spain that are consistent with the Habitat Types (HT) listed in Annex I of the European Union Habitats Directive 92/43 EC. Their dominant species and...

The stabling of livestock farming implies changes in both local ecosystems (regeneration of forest stands via reduced grazing) and those located thousands of kilometers away (deforestation to produce grain for feeding livestock). Despite their importance, these externalities are poorly known. Here we evaluated how the intensification and confinemen...

Vegetation generally appears scattered in drylands. Its structure, composition and spatial patterns are key controls of biotic interactions, water, and nutrient cycles. Applying segmentation methods to very high-resolution images for monitoring changes in vegetation cover can provide relevant information for dryland conservation ecology. For this r...

Distribution area and surface are both parameters of paramount importance for habitat management, monitoring and conservation. Here we present the distribution of eight zonal forest types of mainland Spain that are consistent with the Habitat Types (HT) listed in Annex I of the European Union Habitats Directive 92/43 EC. Their dominant species and...

The aim of this paper is to offer a statistically sound method to make a precise account of the speed of land degradation and regeneration processes. Most common analyses of land degradation focus instead on the extent of degraded areas, rather than on the intensity of degradation processes. The study was implemented for the Potential Extent of Des...

This study quantifies patchiness of eight types of zonal forests in three biogeographic regions of mainland Spain (Atlantic, Alpine and Mediterranean) which together occupy 1,726,578 ha. Their dominant species and European Habitat Type codes (EU Directive 92/43 EEC) are: Fagus sylvatica (9120, 9130 and 9150), Quercus robur and Q. pyrenaica (9230),...

Special Issue "Environmental Sustainability of Agriculture in a Changing Climate" A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 December 2021. Manuscript Submission Information Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are register...

Food systems are driven by incentives that often lead to food being discarded before entering the market and to the degradation of natural resources. Vegetable production in the water-scarce province of Almería, Spain, illustrates this and highlights the need for policies ensuring ethical and environmental sustainability standards.

From its origins, the concept of desertification has been controversial. The prevailing confusion between two desertification visions, one that considers it as the expansion of deserts and another that emphasizes its anthropogenic component, has been transferred to society. Here we illustrate misunderstandings about desertification using a very ill...

Desertification is a major global environmental issue exacerbated by climate change. Strategies to combat desertification include prevention which seeks to reverse the process before the system reaches the stable desertified state. One of these initiatives is to implement early warning tools. This paper presents SAT (the Spanish acronym for Early W...

The current definition of desertification excludes hyper-arid zones given their lack of economic activity. However, the 101 million people living there, ongoing land degradation associated with the use of groundwater for intensive agriculture and climate-change-induced aridity call for a revision of this definition. A free to read version of the a...

In the framework of coastal groundwater-dependent irrigation agriculture, modelling becomes indispensable to know how this renewable resource responds to complex (usually not conceptualized nor monitored) biophysical, social, and economic interactions. Friendly user interfaces are essential to involve nonmodeling experts in exploiting and improving...

Oases are isolated, groundwater-dependent ecosystems placed in desert environments where a careful management of the groundwater resource is mandatory for their protection. Its remoteness has always awakened the draw of travelers. Today modern transport services have triggered the interest of conventional tourism. In spite of the flow of money to t...

Los objetivos concretos de este trabajo son: 1) Definir un procedimiento geomático para la clasificación jerárquica del clima en grandes territorios, con los siguientes requisitos: usar bases de datos normalizadas, abiertas y gratuitas como datos de entrada; usar métodos de clasificación objetivos, explícitos y repetibles; separar claramente el pro...

This paper presents an integrated modelling study aimed at exploring the possible effects of drivers of change in commercial natural annual grasslands. We consider drivers as factors that affect the rangeland but are not affected by it. Thus, the stocking rate is not treated as a driver, but as an endogenous factor ultimately determined by drivers....

Dear Colleagues, We are organizing and editing a Special Issue of the Journal Scientific Programming (IF 1.289, ISSN 1058-9244; https://www.hindawi.com/journals/sp/) entitled "Scientific Programming Tools for Water Management" and would like to invite you to submit a manuscript. The due date for submission is 25 October 2019. May we kindly ask if y...

This work illustrates the application of a simulation model to analyse how swiftly large-scale land-use changes can drive broad territories to collapse. In this sense, the economic needs of a population should not clash with the natural environment but rather be reconciled with it. Abundant literature deals with the integration of socioeconomic dri...

The book explores the origin of deserts and the causes of degradation. Through historical and active degradation processes the aim is to detect mismanagement of land in arid zones to implement sustainable policies.

Mitigation strategies are crucial for desertification given that once degradation starts, other solutions are extremely expensive or unworkable. Prevention is key to handle this problem and solutions should be based on spotting and deactivating the stressors of the system. Following this topic, the Spanish Plan of Action to Combat Desertification (...

States of ecological maturity and temporal trends of drylands in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia north of 28 ˝ N are reported for 1998–2008. The input data were Normalized Difference Vegetation Index databases and corresponding climate fields, at a spatial resolution of 1 km and a temporal resolution of one month. States convey opposing dynamics of hu...

An integrated dynamic model was used to evaluate the influence of climatic, soil, pastoral, economic and managerial factors on sheet erosion in rangelands of SW Spain (dehesas). This was achieved by means of a variance-based sensitivity analysis. Topsoil erodibility, climate change and a combined factor related to soil water storage capacity and th...

A hydrological-economic model is introduced to describe the dynamics of groundwater-dependent economics (agriculture and tourism) for sustainable use in sparse-data drylands. The Amtoudi Oasis, a remote area in southern Morocco, in the northern Sahara attractive for tourism and with evidence of groundwater degradation, was chosen to show the model...

The book is divided into two parts. The first part describes a series of expeditions carried out during 2011-2015 by the Harmusch Association to the Atlantic Sahara in order to search for little-known fauna. The second part summarises the preliminary results of the findings, giving an account of the species sighted and highlighting the status of Cu...

This paper presents an annual multidisciplinary, non-spatial model which formalizes the relationships linking the dynamics of shrubs, herbs, soil, livestock and farmers' behaviour with possible exogenous drivers of degradation, such as weather and prices. The model does not represent a pasture–livestock system but a shrub–soil one and is applied to...

In this paper, a model-based integrated assessment of the long-term consequences of water erosion in four olive groves with different conditions in Andalusia (southern Spain) is carried out. The assessment is based on a system dynamics model built at hillside scale. The modelling approach tackles common difficulties arising from the relative scarci...

United Nations establish the obligation to develop National Plans to Combat Desertification (NPCD). Since prevention is one of the strengths of these plans and considering the multidisciplinary character of the problem – it is defined as degradation of land as a consequence of climatic variations and human activities- System Dynamics is a suitable...

This study aims to monitor the arid Algerian High Plateaus, a key region for pas-toral activities which has suffered harsh and widespread degradation from the eighties. This area is not sufficiently known by the interna-tional scientific community. For this purpose, we considered phytoecological inventories and the- matic maps that have been carrie...

This paper deals with the assessment of sustainability in the exploitation of groundwater by agriculture in arid and semi-arid lands. The procedure proposed is not based on an indicator made up of a few partial, static figures, but on one which requires the use of all the information collectable for the system under assessment. This information ser...

Coffee is the most important international agrarian commodity. Latin Ameri-can countries produces 65% of the total world 7200 millions of kilograms. Honduras produces 3% of the worldwide coffee in 236,462 ha (8% of total cropland). Coffee crop in Honduras is mainly under shade (between 95 and 98% of all the production of coffee) with yields from 70...

This paper analyses competitive groundwater exploitation for irrigation by means of a special case of a dynamic predator–prey or human-resource theoretical model. On the human side, the model considers both farmers’ rational behaviour and a set of economic parameters. Then the model explicitly links these issues to the dynamics of the natural resou...

This paper describes a procedure for evaluating the desertification risk in threatened areas. The procedure is based on an eight-equation dynamic model of a generic human–resource system that can be applied to different desertification syndromes. For each application, interest focuses on finding all the possible long-term final states of the system...

RESUMEN El Real Decreto 1469/2007, de 2 de noviembre, por el que se aprueba la norma de calidad para la carne, el jamón, la paleta y la caña de lomo ibéricos, establece limitaciones a la carga ganadera de cerdo ibérico en las dehesas y obliga a las comunidades autónomas a calcular la carga ganadera máxima de cerdos ibéricos para cada explotación, c...

The oil palm as biodiesel source is an expanding crop in subtropical areas. Where to locate the plantations and its productivity are questions to consider. We made a simplified simulation model of oil palm crop written with the software Vensim® DSS. The model simulates daily growth of a palm plantation and grass in Honduras (Central America). The d...

The dehesa is open oak parkland. These woodlands with silvo-pastoral use cover about four million hectares in the Iberian Peninsula. The objectives of this work were (i) to present a computer simulation model of the dehesa system to estimate productivity and the more suitable stocking rate for cattle, sheep, and Iberian pig; and (ii) to explore the...