Joaquín Hortal

Spanish National Research Council | CSIC · Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales

Ecologists and evolutionary biologists are increasingly using big-data approaches to tackle questions at large spatial, taxonomic, and temporal scales. However, despite recent efforts to gather two centuries of biodiversity inventories into comprehensive databases, many crucial research questions remain unanswered. Here, we update the concept of kn...

Ecology Letters (2011) 14: 741–748 Current climate and Pleistocene climatic changes are both known to be associated with geographical patterns of diversity. We assess their associations with the European Scarabaeinae dung beetles, a group with high dispersal ability and well-known adaptations to warm environments. By assessing spatial stationarity...

Species richness is commonly thought to increase with habitat diversity. However, a recent theoretical model aiming to unify niche and island biogeography theories predicted a hump-shaped relationship between richness and habitat diversity. Given the contradiction between model results and previous knowledge, we examine whether the relationship bet...

It is well known that biodiversity data from historical inventories presents important geographic and taxonomic biases. Due to this, current knowledge on the distribution of most species could be incomplete and biased. We assess how the biases in historical biodiversity data might affect the description of the environmental niche of the species, us...

Aim Quantify potential gains to insect data on the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) through further digitisation of natural history collections, assess to what degree this would fill biases in spatial and environmental record coverage, and deepen understanding of environmental bias with regard to climate rarity. Location Afrotropica...

The bryophyte communities of Atlantic coastal dunes help stabilising these habitats by promoting nutrient fixation, contributing to soil consolidation and enhancing water retention. Because of climate change and sea level rise, negative impacts on this dune vegetation have already been recorded, including habitat loss, shifts in species distributio...

Biological soil covers (BSCs) play a pivotal role in ecosystem functioning by enhancing soil stability, mediating nutrient cycling, and influencing soil hydrology. Recognized as ecosystem engineers, they can physically modify, maintain, or create habitats, facilitating plant community development. Through these intricate interactions, BSCs contribu...

Several studies show that species richness patterns are determined by current climate and Pleistocene climatic oscillations. Additionally, habitat availability is an important driver of current species diversity, especially in aquatic ecosystems where lentic (standing water) and lotic (running water) habitats play distinct roles in species composit...

Unraveling the spatiotemporal dynamics of communities is critical to understand how biodiversity responds to global changes. However, this task is not trivial, as these dynamics are quite complex, and most studies are limited to few taxa at small local and temporal scales. Tropical mountains are ideal indicators of biodiversity response since these...

Understanding the spatiotemporal distribution of species is fundamental for ecology, evolution and conservation. However, this and other aspects of biodiversity knowledge suffer from shortcomings and biases. Quantifying and mapping biodiversity knowledge shortfalls is therefore crucial to ascertain the current quality and completeness of biodiversi...

Ecology increasingly relies on a massive volume of biodiversity occurrence records to draw insights into large‐scale biogeographical, ecological and evolutionary phenomena. This often involves defining a set of criteria that guides the collection, filtering and standardising of available records. These curation processes are often neither described...

The gap between the number of described species and the number of species that actually exist is known as the Linnean shortfall and is of fundamental importance for biogeography and conservation. Unsurprisingly, there have been many attempts to quantify its extent for different taxa and regions. In this Perspective, we argue that such forecasts re...

Aim Insects are one of the least studied taxa, with most species lacking basic ecological and biogeographical information. This problem is particularly acute in the tropics, where low sampling effort hampers accurate estimates of species richness at scale and potentially confounds efforts to identify the drivers of biogeographical gradients. Here,...

Background Incomplete species inventories for Antarctica represent a key challenge for comprehensive ecological research and conservation in the region. Additionally, data required to understand population dynamics, rates of evolution, spatial ranges, functional traits, physiological tolerances and species interactions, all of which are fundamental...

Adaptive colonization is a process wherein a colonizing population exhibits an adaptive change in response to a novel environment, which may be critical to its establishment. To date, theoretical models of adaptive colonization have been based on single-species introductions. However, given their pervasiveness, symbionts will frequently be co-intro...

Dung removal by macrofauna such as dung beetles is an important process for nutrient cycling in pasturelands. Intensification of farming practices generally reduces species and functional diversity of terrestrial invertebrates, which may negatively affect ecosystem services. Here, we investigate the effects of cattle-grazing intensification on dung...

Biodiversity data records contain inaccuracies and biases. To overcome this limitation and establish robust geographic patterns, ecologists often curate records keeping those that are most suitable for their analyses. Yet, this choice is not straightforward and the outcome of the analysis may vary due to a trade‐off between data quality and volume....

Understanding how species respond to land transformation is an essential step toward the development of effective conservation policies. This is especially urgent in deforestation hotspots, and for those groups particularly sensitive to changes in land cover. However, the scarcity of data on population trends is among the most pervasive shortfalls...

Ecological processes are often spatially and temporally structured, potentially leading to autocorrelation either in environmental variables or species distribution data. Because of that, spatially-biased in-situ samples or predictors might affect the outcomes of ecological models used to infer the geographic distribution of species and diversity....

Species are the currency of most biodiversity studies. However, many shortfalls and biases remain in our biodiversity estimates, preventing a comprehensive understanding of the eco-evolutionary processes that have shaped the biodiversity currently available on Earth. Biased biodiversity estimates also jeopardize the effective implementation of data...

The conversion of forests into open areas has large effects on the diversity and structure of native communities. The intensity of these effects may vary between regions, depending on the existence of native species adapted to open habitats in the regional pool or the time since habitat change. We assess the differences in species richness and func...

We compiled a database of firefly species records from the Atlantic Forest hotspot in Brazil and made it available at GBIF. Data were gathered from literature and from several key entomological collections, including: Coleção entomológica Prof. José Alfredo Pinheiro Dutra (DZRJ/UFRJ) and Coleção do Laboratório de Ecologia de Insetos from Universida...

Individual variation in resource use as well as in the response to competitors has been recognized as playing an important role is species interactions. Still, we have as yet little information on whether such responses have a genetic basis as well as on how they affect each other. Here, we tested whether 20 genetically inbred lines of the spider m...

Species' environmental requirements and large‐scale spatial and evolutionary processes determine the structure and composition of local communities. However, ecological interactions also have major effects on community assembly at landscape and local scales. We evaluate whether two xerophytic shrub communities occurring in SW Portugal follow constr...

Colonization of new habitat patches is a key aspect of metacommunity dynamics, particularly for sessile organisms. Mosses can establish in new patches through fragmentation, with different vegetative structures acting as propagules. Despite the importance of these propagules for successful colonization the specific aspects that favour moss coloniza...

Traits are key for understanding the environmental responses and ecological roles of organisms. Trait approaches to functional ecology are well established for plants, whereas consistent frameworks for animal groups are less developed. Here we suggest a framework for the study of the functional ecology of animals from a trait‐based response–effect...

We compiled a database of firefly species records from the Atlantic Forest hotspot in Brazil and made it available at GBIF. Data were gathered from the literature and several key entomological collections, including: Coleção entomológica Prof. José Alfredo Pinheiro Dutra (DZRJ/UFRJ) and Coleção do Laboratório de Ecologia de Insetos from Universidad...

Aim: Aridity gradients are of great interest for understanding the responses of biodi-versity to water availability and water stress. However, little is known about the re-sponses of many animal groups, which are crucial for assessing the effects of climate change. Here, we study the effects of aridity on dung beetle communities, a group with well-...

Aim: Species’ environmental requirements and large-scale spatial and evolutionary processes are known to determine the structure and composition of local communities. However, ecological interactions and historical processes also have major effects on community assembly at landscape and local scales. In this work we evaluate whether two xerophytic...

Biodiversity data can be analysed to predict species distribution at various scales of time and space. However, survey completeness and temporal decay in data quality introduce uncertainty into biodiversity models. Researchers Joaquín Hortal, Juliana Stropp (National Museum of Natural Sciences, Spain), Richard Ladle (University of Porto, Portugal),...

Approaching the consequences of climate change demands understanding how temperature controls species’ responses across key biological aspects, as well as the coordination of thermal responses across these aspects. We study the role of temperature in determining the species’ diel, seasonal, and geographical occurrence, using dung beetles as a model...

Question: Colonization of new habitat patches is a key aspect of metacommunity dynamics, particulary for sessile organisms. Mosses can establish in new patches through fragmentation, with different vegetative structures acting as propagules. Despite the importance of these propagules for successful colonization the specific aspects that favour moss...

Mountains present large climatic variations along elevational gradients, which can affect the distribution and abundance of species over space and time (e.g. reduction in richness towards higher elevations and seasonal variations). However, variations in biodiversity along elevational gradients within the Atlantic Forest – a hyperdiverse and highly...

Species distribution models (SDMs) are subject to many sources of uncertainty, limiting their application in research and practice. One of their main limitations is the quality of the distributional data used to calibrate them, which directly influences the accuracy of model predictions. We propose a standardized methodology to create maps, describ...

The functioning of present ecosystems reflects deep evolutionary history of locally cooccurring species if their functional traits show high phylogenetic signal (PS). However, we do not understand what drives local PS. We hypothesize that local PS is high in undisturbed and stressful habitats, either due to ongoing local assembly of species that ma...

Biddick & Burns (2021) proposed a null/neutral model that reproduces the island rule as a product of random drift. We agree that it is unnecessary to assume adaptive processes driving island dwarfing or gigantism, but several flaws make their approach unrealistic and thus unsuitable as a stochastic model for evolutionary size changes.

Aim Adequate responses of species to climate changes require that thermal changes remain compatible across different key biological aspects (e.g. reproduction, feeding and development). However, limits of thermal compatibility to such biological aspects are largely unknown in extant ectotherm groups. To fill this gap, we studied the intraspecific c...

Background A key challenge for conservation biology in the Neotropics is to understand how deforestation affects biodiversity at various levels of landscape fragmentation. Addressing this challenge requires expanding the coverage of known biodiversity data, which remain to date restricted to a few well-surveyed regions. Here, we assess the sampling...

Biodiversity drives ecological functioning, ultimately providing ecosystem services. Ecosystem processes are favored by greater functional diversity, particularly when groups of functionally different species interact synergistically. Many of such functions are performed by insects, among which dung beetles stand out for their important role in dun...

Aim The Island Rule—that is, the tendency for body size to decrease in large mammals and increase in small mammals on islands has been commonly evaluated through macroecological or macroevolutionary, pattern-orientated approaches, which generally fail to model the microevolutionary processes driving either dwarfing or gigantism. Here, we seek to id...

Species diversity varies in space and time. Temporal changes in the structure and dynamics of communities can occur at different scales. We investigated the temporal changes of dung beetle assemblages in the Amazonian region along seasons, years, and successional stages. We evaluated if assemblage structure changes between temporal scales and wheth...

Species distribution models (SDM) are widely used as indicators of different aspects of geographical ranges for many purposes, from conservation to biogeographical and evolutionary analyses. However, these techniques are susceptible to various sources of uncertainty. Data coverage, species’ ecology, and the characteristics of their geographic distr...

COVID-19 pandemic has rapidly spread worldwide. Spain has suffered one of the largest nationwide bursts, particularly in the highly populated areas of Madrid and Barcelona (two of the five largest conurbations in Europe). We used segmented regression analyses to identify shifts in the evolution of the effective reproduction number (Rt) reported for...

Studies focused on the drivers of change in species composition often fail to integrate several aspects of beta diversity and scale. Here, we assess the impact of species pool, environmental gradients, geographic distance, and spatial scale on the diversity of epiphytic bryophytes. We identify biogeographic modules of co-occurring species using net...

The Neotropics harbour the greatest diversity of freshwater fish on Earth. Despite recent advances in characterizing the fish fauna, the total number of species, distri-butional range, evolution and ecological traits remain uncertain. Thus, we quantify shortfalls in the knowledge of taxonomy (Linnean shortfall), geographic distribution (Wallacean s...

Aim Nearly 40 different hypotheses have been put forward to explain the latitudinal diversity gradient, implying that geographical variations of biodiversity may be the result of a complex array of factors affecting organisms in different ways. Our main goal was to identify the most important drivers of local dung beetle species richness in the Neo...

Understanding the consequences of climate change requires understanding how temperature controls species' responses across key biological aspects, as well as the coordination of thermal responses across these aspects. We study the role of temperature in determining the species' diel, seasonal, and geographical occurrence, using dung beetles as a mo...

One of the largest nationwide bursts of the first COVID-19 outbreak occurred in Spain, where infection expanded in densely populated areas through March 2020. We analyse the cumulative growth curves of reported cases and deaths in all Spain and two highly populated regions, Madrid and Catalonia, identifying changes and sudden shifts in their expone...

2020) Assessing spatial and temporal biases and gaps in the publicly available distributional information of Iberian mosses. Biodiversity Data Journal 8: e53474. https://doi. Abstract One of the most valuable initiatives on massive availability of biodiversity data is the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, which is creating new opportunities...

The relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning is often assessed through trait diversity. However, the relationship between traits and functions is typically assumed but seldom tested. We analyze the relationship between dung beetle traits and three ecological functions: dung removal, dung burial, and seedling emergence. We set up...

Aim Studying species richness patterns by considering all species as equivalent units may prevent a deeper understanding of the origin and maintenance of biodiversity. Here, we deconstructed the species richness of Neotropical lianas by specific attributes of species to study richness–environment relationships. Location Neotropics. Taxon Tribe Bi...

Does the loss of species through habitat decline follow the same pattern whether the area lost is part of a large or a small habitat? An analysis sheds light on this long-running debate, with its implications for conservation strategies. Large and small areas of habitat have different patterns of species loss.

Aim Historical climate variations, current climate and human impacts are known to influence current species richness, but their effects on phylogenetic and trait diversity have been seldom studied. We investigated the relationship of these three factors with the independent variations of species, phylogenetic and trait diversity of European mammals...

Mapas de distribución de las especies de odonatos de Europa a escala de cuadrículas de 50 x 50 km, sintetizados a partir de la información disponible en tres publicaciones especializadas, una monografía (Askew 2004), una guía de campo (Dijkstra & Lewington 2006), y un atlas de distribución y estado de conservación (Boudot & Kalkman 2015). Dicha inf...

COVID-19 pandemic has rapidly spread worldwide. Spain has suffered one of the largest nationwide bursts, particularly in the highly populated areas of Madrid and Barcelona (two of the five largest conurbations in Europe). We used segmented regression analyses to identify shifts in the evolution of the apparent reproductive number (Rt) reported for...

COVID-19 pandemic has spread worldwide rapidly from its first outbreak in China, with different impacts depending on the age and social structure of the populations, and the measures taken by each government. Within Europe, the first countries to be strongly affected have been Italy and Spain. In Spain, infection has expanded in highly populated ar...

The increase of free and open online biodiversity databases is of paramount importance for current research in ecology and evolution. However, little attention is paid to using updated taxonomy in these “biodiversity big data” repositories and the quality of their taxonomic information is often questioned. Here we assess how reliable is the current...

Range expansion results from complex eco-evolutionary processes where range dynamics and niche shifts interact in a novel physical space and/or environment, with scale playing a major role. Obligate symbionts (i.e. organisms permanently living on hosts) differ from free-living organisms in that they depend on strong biotic interactions with their h...

The study of biodiversity started as a single unified field that spanned both ecology and evolution and both macro and micro phenomena. But over the 20th century, major trends drove ecology and evolution apart and pushed an emphasis towards the micro perspective in both disciplines. Macroecology and macroevolution re‐emerged as self‐consciously dis...

According to the island rule, small-bodied vertebrates will tend to evolve larger body size on islands, whereas the opposite happens to large-bodied species. This controversial pattern has been studied at the macroecological and biogeographical scales, but new developments in quantitative evolutionary genetics now allow studying the island rule fro...

Aim Tall and structurally complex forests can provide ample habitat and niche space for climbing plants, supporting high liana species richness. We test to what extent canopy height (as a proxy of 3‐D habitat structure), climate and soil interact to determine species richness in the largest clade of Neotropical lianas. We expect that the effect of...