Jesús N. Pinto-Ledezma

University of Minnesota | UMN · Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behaviour

Darwin's two opposing hypotheses, proposing that non‐native species closely or distantly related to native species are more likely to succeed, are known as ‘Darwin's Naturalization Conundrum’. Recently, invasion ecologists have sought to unravel these hypotheses. Studies that incorporate rich observational data in disturbed ecosystems that integrat...

Darwin's naturalization conundrum posits that the alien species either succeed in the introduced region because they are phylogenetically related to the native species and thus tend to have niches similar to those of native species, or they are phylogenetically dissimilar to native species and thus occupy unfilled niches. This conundrum has receive...

La diversidad alfa (número de especies) de plantas varía con la latitud, siendo que cerca del Ecuador hay más especies que en las zonas templadas (latitudes altas). Un atributo ecológico de igual importancia que la diversidad alfa, pero menos es-tudiado, es la diversidad beta o el número de comunidades diferentes en una región. La diversidad beta p...

Biodiversity is ultimately the outcome of millions of years of evolution; however, due to increasing human domination of the Earth, biodiversity in its multiple dimensions is changing rapidly. Here, we present “phylogenetic completeness” (PC) as a concept and method for safeguarding Earth's evolutionary heritage by maintaining all branches of the t...

Protecting the future of forests relies on our ability to observe changes in forest health. Thus, developing tools for sensing diseases in a timely fashion is critical for managing threats at broad scales. Oak wilt - a disease caused by a pathogenic fungus (Bretziella fagacearum) - is threatening oaks, killing thousands yearly while negatively impa...

Questions Geographic gradients of beta‐diversity help understanding the relationship between species and their environment. However, on a global scale, such patterns are only known for a few taxa, mainly terrestrial vertebrates, especially when considering the phylogenetic dimension. Here, we present the first global analysis of phylogenetic beta‐d...

North American mammals follow a well-established latitudinal diversity gradient in species richness. However, the degree to which species in different mammal clades follow the same latitudinal gradient—and to which each clade contributes to the pattern observed for all mammals remains unknown. Here, we separate the overall mammalian latitudinal div...

Protecting the future of forests relies on our ability to observe changes in forest health. Thus, developing tools for sensing diseases in a timely fashion is critical for managing threats at broad scales. Oak wilt -a disease caused by a pathogenic fungus (Bretziella fagacearum)- is threatening oaks, killing thousands yearly while negatively impact...

Spectroscopy imagery from spaceborne sensors has long been recognized as a key tool for the future mapping of tree species and forest communities. However, the feasibility of mapping forest communities at large spatial extents from spaceborne data is not yet clear. Unlike species mapping using airborne spectroscopy, spaceborne spectroscopy faces ec...

Darwin's naturalization conundrum, which posits that the alien species either succeed in the introduced region because being phylogenetically related to the native species hence being pre-adapted, or are phylogenetically dissimilar to native species and thus occupy unfilled niches, has received a lot of attention but the results have been contradic...

The functional response of plant communities to disturbance is hypothesised to be controlled by changes in environmental conditions and evolutionary history of species within the community. However, separating these influences using direct manipulations of repeated disturbances within ecosystems is rare. We evaluated how 41 years of manipulated fir...

By the end of this century, human-induced climate change and habitat loss may drastically reduce biodiversity, with expected effects on many amphibian lineages. One of these effects is the shift in the geographic distributions of species when tracking suitable climates. Here, we employ a macroecological approach to dynamically model geographic rang...

Considering the global intensification of aridity in tropical biomes due to climate change, we need to understand what shapes the distribution of drought sensitivity in tropical plants. We conducted a pantropical data synthesis representing 1117 species to test whether xylem‐specific hydraulic conductivity (KS), water potential at leaf turgor loss...

The intersection of macroecology and macroevolution is one of today’s most active research in biology. In the last decade, we have witnessed a steady increment of macroecological studies that use metrics attempting to capture macroevolutionary processes to explain present-day biodiversity patterns. Evolutionary explanations of current species richn...

Measuring the dispersal ability of birds is particularly challenging and thus researchers have relied on the extended use of morphological proxies as surrogates for such ability. However, few studies have tested the relationship between morphological proxies and other dispersal-related traits. In this study, we test the relationship of the most com...

Biodiversity, as we see it today, ultimately is the outcome of millions of years of evolution; however, biodiversity in its multiple dimensions is changing rapidly due to increasing human domination of Earth. Here, we present the 'phylogenetic completeness' (PC) a concept and methodology that intends to safeguard Earth's evolutionary assets that ha...

Developing population models for assessing risks to terrestrial plant species listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) is challenging given a paucity of data on their life‐history. The purpose of this study was to develop a novel approach for identifying relatively data‐rich non‐listed species that could serve as re...

Biodiversity is changing at rates only comparable to the major extinction events recorded in geologic history. Feasible approaches to monitor biodiversity at different spatial and temporal scales are urgently necessary. Development of these approaches are critical to advancing towards international biodiversity goals and for developing effective ma...

Biodiversity—the living fabric of our planet—is rapidly changing due to alterations in the climate and human activities. These rapid changes are negatively impacting the capacity of ecosystems to provide goods and services to humanity. The development of new ways to characterize and monitor biodiversity that takes advantage of advancing remote sens...

Climate is a major evolutionary force in driving adaptive differentiation and plasticity in plant function. Xylem anatomy and hydraulic architecture are critical to water use, growth and responses of trees to drought and thus important in delimiting their ecological niches. How wood properties have been shaped through evolution by their climatic or...

To the Editor — Wyborn and Evans argue that global priority maps for conservation have questionable utility and may crowd out local and more contextual research. While we agree with the authors’ central argument that effective and equitable conservation must be rooted at local scales, the assertion that “conservation needs to break free from global...

Biodiversity is rapidly changing due to changes in the climate and human related activities; thus, the accurate predictions of species composition and diversity are critical to developing conservation actions and management strategies. In this paper, using satellite remote sensing products as covariates, we constructed stacked species distribution...

Biodiversity is rapidly changing due to changes in the climate and human related activities; thus, the accurate predictions of species composition and diversity are critical to developing conservation actions and management strategies. In this paper, using oak assemblages distributed across the continental United States obtained from the National E...

The proposed Biology Integration Institute will bring together two major research institutions in the Upper Midwest—the University of Minnesota (UMN) and University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW)—to investigate the causes and consequences of plant biodiversity across scales in a rapidly changing world —from genes and molecules within cells and tissues t...

Accurate predictions of species composition and diversity are critical to the development of conservation actions and management strategies. In this paper using oak assemblages distributed across the conterminous United States as study model, we assessed the performance of stacked species distribution models (S-SDMs) and remote sensing products in...

Charles Darwin posited two alternative hypotheses to explain the success of nonnative species based on their relatedness to natives: nonnative species that are closely related to native species could experience (1) higher invasion success because of an increased probability of habitat suitability (conferred by trait similarity) or (2) lower invasio...

Biodiversity is organized hierarchically from individuals to populations to major lineages in the tree of life. This hierarchical structure has consequences for remote sensing of plant phenotypes and leads to the expectation that more distantly related plants will be more spectrally distinct. Applying remote sensing to understand ecological process...

Interpolated climate surfaces have been widely used to predict species distributions and develop environmental niche models. However, the spatial coverage and density of meteorological sites used to develop these surfaces vary among countries and regions, such that the most biodiverse regions often have the most sparsely sampled climatic data. We e...

The ecological and evolutionary factors underlying life history trait variation is one of the most interesting topics in biology. Although many studies have evaluated either macroevolutionary or macroecological patterns of life history traits across several taxonomic groups, only few studies have attempted to integrate both dimensions in a single a...

This article is a Commentary on Ramírez‐Valiente et al. (2020), 227: 794–809.

Over the last decades, the geographical distribution of species, as well as its associated patterns have been at the core of the macroecology research program. Gradients in geographic range size and shape, as well as range overlap (species richness), reveal broad-scale patterns that may help to infer underlying ecological processes, mainly related...

There are several approaches to understand how a landscape, with its several components, affects the genetic population structure by imposing resistance to gene flow. Here we propose the creation of resistance surfaces using a Pattern-Oriented Modeling approach to explain genetic differentiation, estimated by pairwise FST, among Baruzeiro populatio...

Preventing diseases from becoming a problem where they are not is a common ground for disease ecology. The expectation for vector-borne diseases, especially those transmitted by mosquitos, is that warm and wet conditions favor vector traits increasing transmission potential. The advent of urbanization altering inner climate conditions hazards to in...

Charles Darwin posited two alternative hypotheses to explain the success of nonnative species based on their relatedness to incumbent natives: coexistence between them should be (i) more likely with greater relatedness (due to trait similarity that correlates with better matching to the environment), or (ii) less likely (due to biotic interference,...

Different historical and ecological mechanisms are thought to determine the success of nonnative species in native recipient communities (e.g., dispersal dynamics, adaptation, biotic interactions). Charles Darwin posited two competing hypotheses the explain the success of nonnative species based on the relatedness to incumbent natives: coexistence...

Species co-occurrence in local assemblages is shaped by different processes at different spatial and temporal scales. Here we focus on historical explanations and examine the phylogenetic structure of local assemblages of the Furnariides clade (Aves: Passeriformes), assessing the influence of diversification rates on the assembly and species co-occ...

Supplemental Results 0 100 200 300 0 5 0 1 0 0 1 5 0 Number of sampling units Species diversity Method interpolation extrapolation NA Guides AA FA OA Figure A1: Sample size-based interpolation and extrapolation curves for Furnariides species richness for all assemblages (AA), forest habitat assemblages (FA), and open habitat assemblages (OA) based...

Planet Earth is facing unprecedented rates of biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation. Efforts to sustain our life support systems require comprehensive and continuous monitoring of plant biodiversity and ecosystem function. Information about the diversity and distribution of the Earth's biota is rapidly expanding as a consequence of the digiti...

Understanding why species composition and diversity varies spatially and with environmental variation is a long-standing theme in macroecological research. Numerous hypotheses have been generated to explain species and phylogenetic diversity gradients. Much less attention has been invested in explaining patterns of beta diversity. Biomes boundaries...

Species co-occurrence in local assemblages is shaped by different processes at different spatial and temporal scales. Here we focus on historical explanations and examine the phylogenetic structure of local assemblages of the Furnariides clade (Aves: Passeriformes), assessing the influence of diversification rates on the assembly and species co-occ...

The intersection of macroecology and macroevolution is one of the most active research areas today. Macroecological studies are increasingly using phylogenetic diversification metrics to explore the role of evolutionary processes in shaping present-day patterns of biodiversity. Evolutionary explanations of species richness gradients are key for our...

Resumen. La biodiversidad de la región del Mutún es una de las más amenazadas en la debido a los impactos directos e indirectos generados por las actividades mineras. Es así que, con la finalidad de aportar con información técnica-científica acerca de sus atributos bióticos y que permitan desarrollar estrategias para su conservación, en el presente...

Resumen. En este estudio presentamos el checklist de especies del Cerro Mutún obtenido a partir de inventarios florísticos realizados entre el año 2008 y 2015 en seis comunidades vegetales (bosque semideciduo chiquitano, BCh; bosque chiquitano edafohidrófilo, BChE; cerradão, Ce; cerrado sensu stricto, CSS; campo sujo, CS; y vegetación de bancadas l...

Key innovations are organismal traits that trigger adaptive radiation and lineage diversification. The wide range of anuran reproductive strategies from aquatic to terrestrial modes are potential key innovations. One such strategy is the foam nest, a structure with multiple functions that originated independently several times in different continen...

Key innovations are organismal traits that trigger adaptive radiation and lineage diversification. The wide range of anuran reproductive strategies from aquatic to terrestrial modes are potential key innovations. One such strategy is the foam nest, a structure with multiple functions that originated independently several times in different continen...

Resumen. Debido al incremento de actividad minera a las tierras bajas de Bolivia, además de la ganadería extensiva, la región del Mutún ubicada al Este del departamento de Santa Cruz (municipio de Puerto Suárez) se expone a impactos ambientales que amenazan con degradar la heterogeneidad ambiental del lugar. En este trabajo se presenta una lista de...

Due to rapid advances in technology and data, it is difficult to keep species range and species information up to date. One example of this is the hummingbird Anopetia gounellei (Broad-tipped Hermit), which has been recorded outside its range since 2009. Anopetia gounellei is the only hermit-hummingbird endemic to northeastern Brazil, but it is sti...

Resumen: En el presente documento describimos las características geográficas, físicas, climáticas y socioeconómicas locales y regionales del Mutún, la misma que fue basada en bibliografía y bases de datos virtuales existentes de la región, y nuestras apreciaciones adquiridas durante el trabajo campo. Esta información que presentamos, es el inicio...

Aim Explaining species richness gradients in space and time requires understanding the evolutionary processes that ultimately alter the number of species. Here we examine species richness differences between primary habitats (forest versus open) for Furnariides birds, a Neotropical endemic bird clade, to test three major historical hypotheses – div...

Aim Explaining species richness gradients in space and time requires understanding the evolutionary processes that ultimately alter the number of species. Here we examine species richness differences between primary habitats (forest versus open) for Furnariides birds, a Neotropical endemic bird clade, to test three major historical hypotheses – div...

En Bolivia los anfibios son uno de los grupos más estudiados a nivel de listados de especies (Embert & Reichle, 2008; Jansen, 2009), actualmente se conocen un total de 266 especies repartidas en 3 órdenes, 17 familias y 60 géneros, y se considera que el conocimiento sobre los anfibios de Bolivia se ha incrementado mucho en las últimas dos décadas (...

The lowlands of eastern and northeastern Bolivia are characterized by a transition between the humid evergreen forests of the Amazon Basin and the deciduous thornscrub vegetation of the Gran Chaco. Within this landscape lies one of the world’sbest preserved areas: the ecoregion known as the Chiquitano dry forest, where deforestation patterns over a...

The lowlands of eastern and northeastern Bolivia are characterized by a transition between the humid evergreen forests of the Amazon Basin and the deciduous thorn-scrub vegetation of the Gran Chaco. Within this landscape lies one of the world’s best preserved areas: the ecoregion known as the Chiquitano dry forest, where deforestation patterns over...

Ya han pasado aproximadamente ocho años desde que se realizó el I Congreso Boliviano de Ecología en la ciudad de La Paz (2006), el mismo que surgió ante la necesidad de conocer cuál era el estado de conocimiento de los estudios ecológicos en nuestro país. Desde ese primer congreso se han realizado dos congresos más en las ciudades de Cochabamba (20...