Lilian Sales- Doctor of Philosophy
- Habitat Modelling Specialist at BC Conservation Data Centre
Lilian Sales
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Habitat Modelling Specialist at BC Conservation Data Centre
About
74
Publications
50,250
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1,476
Citations
Introduction
Combining ecological models to natural history, I aim to unveil the impacts of past, present and future global changes on macroecological patterns of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning.
https://lilianpsales.wixsite.com/website
Current institution
BC Conservation Data Centre
Current position
- Habitat Modelling Specialist
Additional affiliations
October 2018 - December 2020
Position
- Professor
Description
- Teaches "Macroecology" and "Species Distribution Modelling" for students of Animal Biology and Ecology graduate courses (30h/semester).
October 2018 - October 2020
May 2019 - June 2019
Position
- PostDoc Position
Description
- An extended visit to the BIOMAC facilities, led by Professor Daniel Kissling.
Education
March 2014 - June 2018
February 2012 - February 2014
Universidade Federal de Lavras
Field of study
- Applied Ecology
March 2006 - March 2011
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
Field of study
- Biology
Publications
Publications (74)
An often-overlooked question of the biodiversity crisis is how natural hazards contribute to species extinction risk. To address this issue, we explored how four natural hazards, earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, and volcanoes, overlapped with the distribution ranges of amphibians, birds, mammals, and reptiles that have either narrow distributions...
Climate-driven migrations towards Northern latitudes are expected to reorganize biotic communities as result of range shift dynamics. However, the establishment of healthy populations of migrating species depends on habitat provision by receptor landscapes. Here, we ask if the rising temperatures and changes in precipitation regimes in western Nort...
Extinção provocada por mudanças climáticas e por alterações no uso do solo pode impactar a relação entre espécies, afetando os chamados serviços ecossistêmicos, como controle de pragas e de vetores de doenças
As plants are sessile organisms, their response to environmental change may be mechanistically mediated by reproductive traits. The spatial segregation and physiological specialization of the sexes in dioicous plants, for instance, create mismatches in individual responses to environmental change. Conversely, the ability of self-fertilization circu...
Biodiversity loss not only implies the loss of species but also entails losses in other dimensions of biodiversity, such as functional, phylogenetic and interaction diversity. Yet, each of those facets of biodiversity may respond differently to extinctions. Here, we examine how extinction, driven by climate and land‐use changes may affect those dif...
Refugia‐based conservation offers long‐term effectiveness and minimize uncertainty on strategies for climate change adaptation. We used distribution modelling to identify climate change refugia for 617 terrestrial mammals and to quantify the role of protected areas (PAs) in providing refugia across South America. To do so, we compared species poten...
Linking local to regional ecological and evolutionary processes is key to understand the response of Earth's biodiversity to environmental changes. Here we integrate evolution and mutualistic coevolution in a model of metacommunity dynamics and use numerical simulations to understand how coevolution can shape species distribution and persistence in...
Background
Terrestrial biomes in South America are likely to experience a persistent increase in environmental temperature, possibly combined with moisture reduction due to climate change. In addition, natural fire ignition sources, such as lightning, can become more frequent under climate change scenarios since favourable environmental conditions...
Academic productivity is often defined as the number of published scientific articles, citations, and grants a scientist achieves (Sarli and Carpenter, 2014). It is considered an objective metric of a researcher's impact or ability in their field (Sarli and Carpenter, 2014) and is used to rank competitors for research funding, job openings, and oth...
Anthropogenic climate and land use changes are the main drivers of biodiversity loss, promoting a major reorganization of the biota in all ecosystems. Biodiversity loss implies not only in the loss of species, but also entails losses in other dimensions of biodiversity, such as functional diversity, phylogenetic diversity and the diversity of ecolo...
Wild pigs (Sus scrofa L.) are considered one of the 100 worst invasive species, causing adverse social, economic, and environmental impacts worldwide. Understanding their historical invasion process and following the distribution across the territory can serve as a preoccupant alert for the species’ quick expansion. Our goal was to update the infor...
Here, we investigate the influence of scale on different drivers influencing the occurrence of the chytrid fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), in the Atlantic Forest, Brazil. We used gridded values of proxies of the abiotic, biotic and anthropogenic components of landscapes where Bd infects amphibians. Building upon disease prevalence data...
Aim
Many plants rely on interactions with frugivores for dispersal, suggesting that animal communities may affect plant occupancy and diversity. However, the contribution of these interaction‐led biotic variables on plant diversity is poorly understood, especially in archipelagic hotspots such as the Caribbean. In island ecosystems, biogeographic t...
Humans have reshaped the distribution of biodiversity across the globe, extirpating species from regions otherwise suitable and restricting populations to a subset of their original ranges. Here, we ask if anthropogenic range contractions since the Late Pleistocene led to an under‐representation of the realized niches for megafauna, an emblematic g...
Rainforests have been a source of lineages to open and seasonally dry habitats throughout Angiosperm evolution, especially in the Neotropics. However, the underlying mechanisms that allow such shifts remain poorly understood at large spatial scales. Here, we test whether acaulescence (an underground stem or a very short stem concealed in the ground...
Infectious diseases are a growing threat to the conservation of nonhuman primates. In the case of diseases shared with humans, the risk is higher where habitat loss and fragmentation facilitate proximity to wildlife. Yellow fever (YF) is an infectious disease transmitted by mosquito vectors between primates in a sylvatic cycle or between humans in...
Climate change will likely increase the frequency and magnitude of wildfires, imposing novel stressors on biodiversity and ecosystem services. By focusing on Brazilian biomes, we use an innovative combination of techniques based on satellite-derived climate predictors and fire occurrence time-series data to quantify the relationship between climate...
Forecasting the effects of global change on biodiversity is necessary to anticipate the threats operating at different scales in space and time. Climate change may create unsuitable environmental conditions, forcing species to move to persist. However, land-use changes create barriers that limit the access of some species to future available habita...
Ecologists have long had a "love-hate" relationship with the niche concept. Sometimes referred to as a term best left undefined, the niche concept nonetheless spans ecology. Deeply rooted in the Darwinian struggle for survival , "niche" has been a core, although slippery, idea in ecology since its origins. What ecologists mean by niche has changed...
Niche conservatism explains biological invasions worldwide. However, a plethora of ecological processes may lead invasive species to occupy environments that are different from those found within native ranges. Here, we assess the potential invadable areas of the world’s most pervasive invasive amphibians: the cane toad, Rhinella marina + R. horrib...
Species distribution patterns are constrained by historical and ecological processes in space and time, but very often the species range sizes are geographical sampling biases resulting from unequal sampling effort. One of the most common definitions of endemism is based on the "congruence of distributional areas" criterion, when two or more specie...
Aim
Global changes will redistribute biodiversity, reshaping ecological interactions and ecosystem processes. The decoupling in the distribution of plants and their mutualistic seed dispersers, for instance, may have overlooked eco‐evolutionary effects. How animal‐dispersed plants will respond to changes in the distribution of their seed dispersers...
The Atlantic Forest of South America hosts one of the world’s most diverse and threatened tropical forest biota. After five centuries of European human expansion, most Atlantic Forest landscapes are archipelagos of small forest fragments surrounded by open-habitat matrices. In this chapter, we describe the causes and consequences of large-scale def...
RESUMO: As mudanças climáticas e o desmatamento vão redistribuir a biodiversidade no próximo século. Porém, nem todas as espécies respondem a esses fatores da mesma maneira. Diferenças na resposta das espécies levarão ao desacoplamento espacial de interações bióticas, com consequências ainda pouco conhecidas nos ecossistemas. Neste trabalho, avalia...
Aim
Climate change and deforestation will redistribute biodiversity in the next century. Species‐specific differences in the response to these stressors will lead to distribution decoupling of interacting species. However, consequences for ecosystem services are poorly known. Here, we assess the potential effects of future distribution mismatch on...
Biological invasion is one of the main threats to native biodiversity. For a species to become invasive, it must be voluntarily or involuntarily introduced by humans into a nonnative habitat. Mammals were among first taxa to be introduced worldwide for game, meat, and labor, yet the number of species introduced in the Neotropics remains unknown. In...
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, publications have highlighted the disproportionate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on academic mothers, mostly focusing on the impact of social distancing and quarantine. A few months later, despite the lack of effective vaccines or therapeutics in sight, many economic activities are being resumed. Nurs...
Effect of spatial scale in biotic and abiotic factors in the distribution of the chytrid fungus in the Atlantic Forest Efeito da escala espacial em fatores bióticos e abióticos na distribuição do fungo quitrídeo na Mata Atlântica CAMPINAS 2020
Women are underrepresented in professional spaces, particularly at leadership positions. In science, the participation in editorial boards of journals is evidence of a high reputation within a specialty or field. Therefore, female presence in editorial boards can be used as a proxy for female presence and leadership in academic spaces. Here, we ass...
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is magnifying existing oppression, sparking discussions among scientists about the post-pandemic community we want to build. Transgender scientists should be a part of these conversations to ensure that their needs are recognized as we strive to make science more diverse and inclusive.
Humans have fragmented, reduced, or altered the biodiversity in tropical forests around the world. Climate and land‐use change act synergistically, increasing drought and fire frequencies, converting several tropical rainforests into derived savannas, a phenomenon known as ‘savannization’. Yet, we lack a full understanding of the faunal changes in...
The COVID-19 pandemic poses major challenges for all sectors of society, including scientists faced with abrupt disruptions and redirections of research and higher education. The consequences of this crisis will disproportionately impact early-career scientists; especially those from communities historically under-represented, disadvantaged and/or...
Owing to climate change, species’ geographical distribution may be extended, reduced or displaced in the future. Across species’ ranges, novel climate conditions may also expose species to thermal conditions for which they are not adapted. Migration toward more suitable climates will, however, only be possible if species are able to keep pace with...
Climate change will redistribute the global biodiversity in the Anthropocene. As climates change, species might move from one place to another, due to local extinctions and colonization of new environments. However, the existence of permeable migratory routes precedes faunal migrations in fragmented landscapes. Here, we investigate how dispersal wi...
Rewilding is emerging as a major issue in conservation. However, there are currently a dozen definitions of rewilding that include Pleistocene rewilding, island rewilding, trophic rewilding, functional rewilding and passive rewilding, and these remain fuzzy, lack clarity and, hence, hinder scientific discourse. Based on current definitions, it is u...
Historical contingency may lead to distinct evolutionary imprints in early‐isolated taxonomic groups. Here, we used comparative phylogenetics to unravel biogeographical imprints left by distinct historical contingencies on the evolutionary patterns of life‐history traits of an iconic group, currently separated by ocean‐wide distance: the marsupials...
Primates play an important role in ecosystem functioning and offer critical insights into human evolution, biology, behavior, and emerging infectious diseases. There are 26 primate species in the Atlantic Forests of South America, 19 of them endemic. We compiled a dataset of 5,472 georeferenced locations of 26 native and 1 introduced primate specie...
Root rots are a constraint for staple food crops and a long-lasting food security problem worldwide. In common beans, yield losses originating from root damage are frequently attributed to dry root rot, a disease caused by the Fusarium solani species complex. The aim of this study was to model the current potential distribution of common bean dry r...
Climate change is not only a major threat to biodiversity, it is also a big challenge to the development of conservation strategies. Scientists and practitioners need to select or avoid areas at greatest risk for species protection, i.e., acting in a proactive or a reactive manner. This proactive/reactive dichotomy takes a particular formulation un...
As alterações climáticas previstas para o século XXI afetarão a biodiversidade e seus
padrões de distribuição. Nesta tese, buscamos antecipar os efeitos do clima e das
mudanças climáticas na distribuição geográfica de diferentes espécies de vertebrados.
Nossas projeções futuras sugerem uma redistribuição da biodiversidade, devido à
realocação das o...
In striking contrast to heartening events in the adjacent Amazon, Brazil's Cerrado biome has seen continued deforestation over the past decade. Though approved in 2012, no study evaluated the impacts of new Brazilian Forest Code (FC) revision on biodiversity and ecosystem services. Here, we report the first assessment of the likely loss and gain in...
Resumo. Em contraste com ações positivas na Amazônia, o bioma Cerrado tem sofrido desmatamento contínuo na última década. Apesar de ter sido aprovado em 2012, nenhum estudo avaliou ainda os impactos do cumprimento do novo Código Florestal Brasileiro (CF) sobre a biodiversidade e os serviços ecossistêmicos. Aqui apresentamos a primeira avaliação das...
Root rots are a constraint for staple food crops and a long-lasting food security problem worldwide. In common beans, yield losses originating from root damage are frequently attributed to dry root rot, a disease caused by the Fusarium solani species complex. The aim of this study was to model the current potential distribution of common bean dry r...
Current and future projections of dry root rot of common beans according to the inoculum thresholds of 1200, 3700 and 4500 propugules per soil gram (PPG).
(TIF)
Dry root rot occurrence in Brazilian municipalities according to disease records in common bean fields, by several publications.
Scientific papers, short communications, and technical documents were selected according to their reports of the disease outbreaks in different sampling sites.
(DOCX)
Effect of the climate change on disease proxies according to statistical method.
(DOCX)
Background
Climate change is arguably a major threat to biodiversity conservation and there are several methods to assess its impacts on species potential distribution. Yet the extent to which different approaches on species distribution modeling affect species richness patterns at biogeographical scale is however unaddressed in literature. In this...
Uncertainty on species richness pattern for Amazonia mammals.
Species distribution models projected for year 2070, derived from the hierarchical ANOVA factors: biological data source (IUCN range maps and point-locality records), modeling method (BIOCLIM, ENFA, Euclidian distance, GLM, GAM, MARS, MaxEnt, RF, and ANN), greenhouse gases emission scena...
Summary statistics of Amazon endemic amphibians, birds and mammals.
Taxonomic information of species for which we estimated vulnerability to climate change is included. The mean range shift is the variation in the number of suitable climate cells in species potential distribution (current potential distribution—future potential distribution) and wa...
Details on model parameterization.
Model parametrization of the nine methods used to model species distribution and evaluate the impacts of climate change on Amazon biodiversity. All methods included the automatic search using ROC as probability cutoff, permutation with 10 cross-validation replicates and 75% replicate training.
(DOCX)
Taxonomic information and conservation status of the species used in this work.
Acronyms are indicated, as follows: LC: least concern, NT: near threatened, VU: vulnerable, EN: endangered; Decr: decreasing, Sta: stable, Unkn: unknown.
(DOCX)
Niche conservatism, i.e. the retention of a species’ fundamental niche through evolutionary time, is cornerstone for biological invasion assessments. The fact that species tend to maintain their original climate niche allows predictive maps of invasion risk to anticipate potential invadable areas. Unravelling the mechanisms driving niche shifts can...
Human-induced climate change is considered a conspicuous threat to biodiversity in the 21 st century. Species' response to climate change depends on their exposition, sensitivity and ability to adapt to novel climates. Exposure to climate change is however uneven within species' range, so that some populations may be more at risk than others. Ident...
Factor Analysis showing the collinearity among 19 bioclimatic variables.
Values in bold indicate variables used to quantify mammal exposure to climate change in the Brazilian Amazon. The minus sign (-) indicates very small values not shown
(PDF)
Current (1950–2000) climatic variability (maximum and minimum) present within all extent of 376 Amazon mammal species’ range (range not exclusively within Amazon extent).
Maximum and minimum values for each climatic variable within species’ range are shown in red and green, respectively.
(TIF)
Spatial distribution of effective and non-effective protected areas (PAs) in the Brazilian Amazon.
Effective PAs are those supposed to buffer species against effects of climate change as assessed by a null model that allocated each PA within the Amazon keeping its size, shape and orientation. These results are based on a combination of four climati...
The 376 mammal species inhabiting the Brazilian Amazon analyzed in this study.
A species was considered critically-exposed when more than 80% of its range was exposed to four climatic variables taken together. Endemic species are signed with an asterisk (*).
(PDF)
Effectiveness of the Brazilian Amazon Protected Areas (PAs) in representing critically-exposed mammal assessed by comparing species richness of each PA against richness estimated by a null model.
Federal and state PAs are subdivided into two categories: Sustainable Use (SU) and Full Protection (FP). PAs assigned with (*) were considered as effectiv...
Dry root rot is an ubiquitous problem on common beans in Brazil, with yearly yield losses attributed to the Fusarium solani species complex. Species distribution models (SDMs) based on 21 field disease records were developed to assess the dry root rot current geographical distribution, and estimate the disese range expected in IPCC scenarios A1B an...
Patterns of biodiversity respond to habitat disturbances and different land-uses. Those patterns possibly vary according to the spatial scale under analysis. Although other studies have shown such responses for different systems, no study has ever demonstrated spatial-scale influences in subterranean terrestrial communities. Therefore, the objectiv...
Monitoring wildlife is challenging. There is no silver bullet management action aimed at sustaining biodiversity and beneficial for all species anywhere. Uncertainties permeate all sampling protocols and some of them can really threaten the effectiveness of management plans (as illustrated in the recent debate on the use of indices in ecology by Ni...
Documenting the impacts of the Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions on predator-prey interactions is a challenge because of the incomplete fossil record and depauperate extant community structure. We used a comparative ecological approach to investigate whether the existing prey preference patterns of jaguars Panthera onca were potentially affected b...
Species response to land-use changes are usually assessed by investigating factors affecting distribution, with a single snapshot in time. However, several processes can lead to a same pattern. Focusing on observed, short-term patterns limits our ability to make inferences about ecological processes and responses to environmental change over time....
Understanding the drivers of species distributions in human-dominated landscapes is crucial for proposing sound conservation strategies. Primates are the most studied terrestrial vertebrate taxa, yet still, their response to forest loss and fragmentation widely varies among species. In this paper, we assessed the relative influence of local vs land...
Extinctions following habitat loss can be time-delayed, creating an extinction debt in the landscape. Under extinction debts, the observed pattern of species distribution can be better explained by past rather than current landscape features. Species may differ in their susceptibility to extinction debts due to species-specific, life-history traits...
Questions
Questions (3)
Hello RG community! I am looking for a database containing an ANNUAL index of the human impact on landscapes. The Human Footprint Index does not contain annual information (as far as I know). Can anyone suggest another database? PS: The focus of the study is on Southern South America.
The field of species distribution modelling has experienced fast growth in the last decade. With so many R packages available (sdm, dismo, ENMeval, BIOMOD, SDMtune, ssdm, esdm, ENMTML, ...) it is difficult to find the "best" approach. Which is the most comprehensive platform to fit, evaluate and project/predict species distributions across space and time, in addition to assessing variable's importance and response curves?
Hey everyone!
Where can I find future projections of global climate, preferably decadal average forecasts (means to yr 2030, 2040, ..., 2100) in a WorldClim-like format (bioclimatic predictions for different climate models).
Many thanks,
Lilian
