Lucas A Garibaldi

National University of Río Negro | UNRN · Andina Campus

The impact of land use changes on ecosystem services (ES) or Nature's Contributions to People (NCP) is relatively well-known, but the influence of socioeconomic changes on ES remains less clear, especially at larger spatial scales. Multiple socioeconomic factors influence the demand for a service (i.e. higher economic income and human development c...

Soil eutrophication can trigger drastic changes in biological interactions. However, it is not clear, particularly in forest ecosystems, how different symbiotic microorganisms respond to eutrophication or how responses might differ according to the nutrients involved (e.g., additive vs. interactive effects). In this study we evaluated how arbuscula...

In a recent speech to the UN General Assembly, Argentine President Javier Milei rejected the Pact for the Future and the 2030 Agenda, a comprehensive global framework for sustainable development encompassing ‘people, planet, and prosperity.’ This position undermines Argentina’s capacity to tackle urgent socio-environmental challenges like poverty,...

Agroecological-based practices (ABPs) play a vital role in urban vegetable gardens, enhancing the quality of life. However, factors driving ABP implementation and their impact on crop production and diversity are not fully understood. Our study assessed the influence of socioeconomic and environmental characteristics on ABP adoption, crop diversity...

Domesticated honeybee management (Apis mellifera) could be a useful tool to supplement wild pollinators and increase crop productivity. However, it is necessary to know the optimal hive density for each particular crop. Sunflower (Helianthus annuus) is the third most produced oil seed crop in the world and is dependent on insect pollination to incr...

Multifunctional productive systems based on native species management, a new paradigm that counters colonial worldviews, offer sustainable sources of food and materials while preserving biodiversity. Despite extensive discussions in herbaceous and agricultural systems, applying this concept to native forests in Northern Patagonia remains unclear. M...

Over the last quarter century, increasing honey bee colony losses motivated standardized large-scale surveys of managed honey bees (Apis mellifera), particularly in Europe and the United States. Here we present the first large-scale standardized survey of colony losses of managed honey bees and stingless bees across Latin America. Overall, 1736 bee...

Proper management of woody ecosystems is fundamental for human livelihoods and biodiversity conservation. Strip cutting or selective harvesting are proposed as sustainable alternatives to clear-cut logging. However, their impacts are not fully understood, especially when we consider the harvesting intensity levels and the invasibility of an ecosyst...

Aim: Global-scale studies are necessary to draw general conclusions on how trophicinteractions vary with urbanization and to explore how the effects of urbanizationchange along latitudinal gradients. We predict that the intensity of trophic interac-tions decreases in response to urbanization (quantified by human population density).Since trophic in...

Aims Functional connectivity is crucial for conserving biodiversity and ecosystem services in fragmented landscapes. Linear landscape elements play an important role in providing refuge for plants and pollinators, as well as serving as biological corridors. The aim of this study was to assess the importance of road verges in maintaining the ecologi...

Aim Most of the world's food crops are dependent on pollinators. However, there is a great deal of uncertainty in the strength of this relationship, especially regarding the relative contributions of the honey bee (often a managed species) and wild insects to crop yields on a global scale. Previous data syntheses have likewise reached differing con...

Information regarding the relationship between fertilization, mycorrhizas, and plant growth is scattered for non-conventional productive plant species. We evaluated the effect of different substrates and fertilization treatments on growth and colonization by arbuscular mycorrhizas of young Berberis microphylla plants, a native Patagonian shrub with...

Intensification of crop sequence (ICS) has been proposed as a key field practice to preserve soil health and achieve more sustainable agricultural systems. However, the effects of ICS are site‐specific and vary according to soil characteristics, climatic conditions, the duration of the crop sequencing and the types of crop involved. Soil aggregate...

The change in nutrient availability in the soil can affect key functions of forest ecosystems, such as insect herbivory. Although insect herbivory is particularly relevant because it can impact on the growth and mortality of forest plant species, the evidence of the impacts of fertilizers addition on herbivory patterns is limited. In this study, we...

Agroecosystem diversification is often implemented to diminish herbivory and reduce yield losses. However, increasing plant richness does not always reduce herbivory levels, so there is a need for better understanding which polyculture characteristics are effective in deterring herbivores. Here, we evaluated the hypothesis that functional and phylo...

The city of Bariloche is paradigmatic for its scarce territorial planning and the marked socioeconomic and environmental inequalities within its boundaries. In this city, the preponderant tourist activity has directed since 1960 the development of the city and is in tension with other activities such as the local production of fresh food. These pro...

The Pampean region constitutes one of the most extensive and productive grasslands in the world and experienced an abrupt agricultural expansion in the 20th century, which transformed the landscape into a mosaic of agricultural fields, extensive pasture lands for cattle, and scarce semi-natural habitats. These anthropic modifications strongly impac...

In recent decades, technological and methodological advances, such as satellite information, computer power, geospatial analysis and algorithm development have facilitated the search for solutions to complex problems like global change. These advances resulted in the development of platforms for ecosystem services (ES) modeling, which quantifies na...

Phenological overlap between crop flowering and pollinators is a crucial trait for the pollination of more than 75% of the world's crops. However, crop management rarely considers the seasonal aspect of plant–pollinator mutualism. Here, we investigate the phenological overlap between crops and pollinators and how it affects pollination and fruit pr...

The expansion of homogeneous landscapes has been a major driver of biodiversity loss, climate change and land degradation. There is an urgent need for a transition to multifunctional landscapes that provide abundant and nutritious food while also delivering several other contributions essential for a good quality of life. However, implementing this...

Over the last quarter century, increasing bee colony losses motivated standardized large-scale surveys of managed honey bees ( Apis mellifera ), particularly in Europe and the United States. Here we present the first large-scale standardized survey of colony losses of managed honey bees and stingless bees across Latin America. Overall, 1736 beekeep...

Aim: Studies conducted at a global scale are necessary to make general conclusions on the effect of urbanization on trophic interactions and explore how these effects change along latitudinal gradients. Since biotic interactions are more intense at lower latitudes, we predict that the intensity of trophic interactions will decrease in response to u...

The challenges of bee research in Asia are unique and severe, reflecting different cultures, landscapes, and faunas. Strategies and frameworks developed in North America or Europe may not prove applicable. Virtually none of these species have been assessed by the IUCN and there is a paucity of public data on even the basics of bee distribution. If...

Globally, the increasing forests vulnerability and drought-induced forest mortality events, extended to a larger scale, may have the potential to rapidly alter forest functioning and the provision of ecosystem services. Pata-gonian forests in Southern South America constitute an extensive reservoir of wildlife, but at the same time they have high p...

Pollination is a vitally important function in nature and becomes an ecosystem service because it influences the food and nutritional security for people. However, the contribution of different functional traits of insects for pollen transport of plants is still poorly known. We explore the relationship between pollinator insect functional traits a...

Globally, human activities impose threats to nature and the provision of ecosystem services, such as pollination. In this context, ecological restoration provides opportunities to create managed landscapes that maximize biodiversity conservation and sustainable agriculture, e.g., via provision of pollination services. Managing pollination services...

• A partir da avaliação da demanda e oferta de polinizadores em uma área, é possível definir um planejamento da paisagem que beneficie a produtividade agrícola, a segurança alimentar e a conservação da biodiversidade; • Propriedades rurais com áreas naturais conservadas e práticas agrícolas amigáveis à biodiversidade se beneficiam mais da polinizaç...

• Assessing pollinator supply and demand is a useful tool for designing landscape management strategies to improve agricultural productivity, food security and biodiversity conservation; • Rural properties with conserved natural areas and biodiversity-friendly agricultural practices benefit more from crop pollination and contribute to the conservat...

Many publications lack sufficient background information (e.g. location) to be interpreted, replicated, or reused for synthesis. This impedes scientific progress and the application of science to practice. Reporting guidelines (e.g. checklists) improve reporting standards. They have been widely taken up in the medical sciences, but not in ecologica...

Abundant and diverse floral resources are needed for the preservation of pollinator populations and the services they provide to human societies. However, pollinators are negatively affected by several agricultural practices, among which pesticide use and ‘weed’ removal stand out. McDougall et al. (2021) published a paper titled ‘Managing orchard g...

Una estrategia de manejo forestal que podría combinar exitosamente la producción y la conservación de la biodiversidad en bosques naturales, es su enriquecimiento con árboles nativos de valor maderero. En ciertos bosques de Patagonia (e.g. matorrales) esto requiere definir el grado de apertura inicial del dosel para garantizar el éxito de la planta...

Intensive agriculture with high reliance on pesticides and fertilizers constitutes a major strategy for ‘feeding the world’. However, such conventional intensification is linked to diminishing returns and can result in ‘intensification traps’ – production declines triggered by the negative feedback of biodiversity loss at high input levels. We deve...

Networks are a convenient way to represent many interactions among different entities as they provide an efficient and clear methodology to evaluate and organize relevant data. While there are many features for characterizing networks there is a quantity that seems rather elusive: Complexity. The quantification of the complexity of networks is nowa...

In late 2021, a range of experts from around the world were approached to provide expert input to the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF)–the new strategic framework under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) that will guide interventions to conserve biodiversity and ecosystem services for the next three decades. In this opinion...

Farming systems that support locally diverse agricultural production and high levels of biodiversity are in rapid decline, despite evidence of their benefits for climate, environmental health, and food security. Yet, agricultural policies, financial incentives, and market concentration increasingly constrain the viability of diversified farming sys...

Los bosques nativos cumplen un importante rol en el bienestar y salud de las personas. Actúan como reguladores climáticos, almacenando cerca del 45% del carbono de la biósfera terrestre y proveen otra gran cantidad de bienes y servicios ecosistémicos. El actual contexto de cambio global, principalmente los procesos de cambios en el clima y en el us...

The exponential growth of herbicide-resistant weeds poses enormous challenges to the sustainability of food systems. While great efforts in weed management are being performed at the plot level, the influence of the landscape context on the presence of herbicide-resistant weeds remains largely unknown. We tested these ideas through a large-scale sa...

La extracción de biomasa en bosques nativos puede inducir cambios en su funcionamiento. Los escasos estudios sobre estos cambios determinan un vacío en el conocimiento. En este trabajo evaluamos la respuesta de la producción y la descomposición de restos vegetales ante intensidades crecientes de corta de biomasa en fajas en matorrales nativos. Real...

Conventional agriculture is frequently associated with large-scale environmental degradation and landscape homogenization. In contrast, ecological intensification incorporates natural habitat conservation and landscape complexity to improve important ecosystem services such as pollination and crop yields. In an observational study of 105 fields in...

Los bosques nativos son los ecosistemas naturales que más atención reciben de la sociedad en relación con su conservación y manejo. El alcance de la definición de bosque nativo ha cambiado con el tiempo, lo cual afecta la implementación de diversos instrumentos que usan las instituciones (e.g., cuando se identifican las coberturas de bosques alcanz...

Agriculture is the largest single source of environmental degradation, responsible for over 30% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, 70% of freshwater use and 80% of land conversion: it is the single largest driver of biodiversity loss (Foley JA, Science 309:570–574, 2005, Nature 478:337–342, 2011; IPBES. Global assessment report on biodiversi...

The productivity of approximately 75% of crops worldwide depends to some extent on insect pollination. However, while global agriculture is becoming more dependent on pollinators, wild populations of pollinators are declining. For this reason, hives of Apis mellifera (honeybees), the most widely used pollinator, are commonly placed in the fields; i...

Pollinators are critical for food security; however, their contribution to the pollination of locally important crops is still unclear, especially for non-bee pollinators. We reviewed the diversity, conservation status, and role of bee and non-bee pollinators in 83 different crops described either as important for the global food market or of local...

Background: Animal pollination supports agricultural production for many healthy foods, such as fruits, vegetables, nuts, and legumes, that provide key nutrients and protect against noncommunicable disease. Today, most crops receive suboptimal pollination because of limited abundance and diversity of pollinating insects. Animal pollinators are cur...

A fundamental challenge of land use management is to sustain the production of food, energy and fiber whilst preserving biodiversity and ecosystem functions. Some promising solutions to current resource-use conflicts are rooted in (agro) ecological intensification, which proposes that ecosystem functions provided by natural habitat can largely repl...

Direct consequences of biological invasions on biodiversity and the environment have been largely documented. Yet collateral indirect effects mediated by changes in agri-environmental policies aimed at combating invasions remain little explored. Here we assessed the effects of recent changes in water management in rice farming, which are aimed at b...

Agricultural landscapes cover >60% of terrestrial landscapes. While biodiversity conservation and crop productivity have been seen as mutually exclusive options for a long time, recent research suggests that agricultural landscapes represent significant opportunities for biodiversity conservation outside of traditional protected areas. Here, we use...

RESUMEN La ciudad de Bariloche, es paradigmática por su escasa planificación territorial y las marcadas desigualdades socio-económicas y ambientales en su ejido. Asimismo, en Bariloche la actividad turística anual preponderante ha direccionado el desarrollo de la ciudad y se encuentra en constante tensión con otras actividades como la producción lo...

The decline of pollinators is a widespread problem in today's agriculture, affecting the yield of many crops. Improved pollination management is therefore essential, and honey bee colonies are often used to improve pollination levels. In this work, we applied a spatially explicit agent-based model for the simulation of crop pollination by honey bee...

Background Animal pollination supports agricultural production for many healthy foods, such as fruits, vegetables, nuts, and legumes, which provide key nutrients and protect against non-communicable diseases. Today, most crops receive suboptimal pollination because of reduced abundance and diversity of pollinating insects. Methods We modelled the...

La ciudad de Bariloche, es paradigmática por su escasa planificación territorial y las marcadas desigualdades socio-económicas y ambientales en su ejido. Ante este contexto nuestro objetivo general es evaluar los efectos de las huertas urbanas sobre la biodiversidad circundante, medir la calidad y cantidad de alimentos producidos y entender el rol...

Evidence of a decline in wild pollinators is increasing across global and local habitats. However, with regional variation, the number of managed pollinators has increased globally. Whether these managed pollinators can sufficiently meet the agricultural pollination demand given wild pollinator declines remains unclear. Data on 49 honeybee-pollinat...

R������. Las parcelas forestales permanentes son áreas de muestreo donde se registran periódicamente la identidad, abundancia y tamaño de los árboles, para estudiar cómo cambian los bosques en relación con el clima, los disturbios naturales y los usos y manejos. Hasta hoy, los patrones de cambio observados con parcelas permanentes en la Argentina t...

Extreme events, such as those caused by climate change, economic or geopolitical shocks, and pest or disease epidemics, threaten global food security. The complexity of causation, as well as the myriad ways that an event, or a sequence of events, creates cascading and systemic impacts, poses significant challenges to food systems research and polic...

ABSTRACT. Mounting evidence shows that pollinators are declining as a result of widespread environmental degradation. This loss raises concerns that a global pollination crisis could threaten the human food supply by decreasing crop yield and even promote famine under a hypothetical scenario of total pollinator extinction. This catastrophic possibi...

Despite recent advances in understanding the role of biodiversity in ecosystem-service provision, the links between the health of ecosystem-service providers and human health remain more uncertain. During the past decade, an increasing number of studies have argued for the positive impacts of healthy pollinator communities (defined as functionally...

The conservation status of pollinators and pollination in Latin America (LA) is reviewed. The knowledge regarding native and managed pollinators (e.g., honeybee and stingless bees) and pollination services was synthetized, and the guidelines to improve the opportunities for conservation are provided, considering the threats to pollinators and the p...

Seventy five percent of the world's food crops benefit from insect pollination. Hence, there has been increased interest in how global change drivers impact this critical ecosystem service. Because standardized data on crop pollination are rarely available, we are limited in our capacity to understand the variation in pollination benefits to crop y...

Disturbances can facilitate the spread of exotic plants, which establish mutualisms with exotic bees, constituting invader complexes. However, a disturbance-mediated increase in flower resources can also promote native floral visitors due to the fact that plant-pollinator interactions are generalist. We experimentally tested these ideas in northern...

Sustainable management of native species is essential in regions where forest is continually decreasing, such as South America. A first step for sustainable management is to develop models of productivity and site quality, which are usually related to the height of dominant trees. The aim of this study was to model the height (h) of dominant trees...

Calafate (Berberis microphylla) is a native and widely distributed Patagonian shrub, which produces edible fruits with excellent antioxidant and nutraceutical properties. This study evaluates its multiplication by the rooting of stem cuttings, a widely used method in fruit species with little success so far in B. microphylla. This work was carried...

Sound management of native forests used for cattle grazing requires understanding the dynamics of forage productivity in the openings. Despite their importance, forage productivity drivers in highly heterogeneous forested landscapes, or their variability over the year, are still unclear. The aim of this work is to find predictors of Normalized Diff...

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...

Working landscapes represent >60% of terrestrial landscapes and thus represent opportunities for biodiversity conservation outside of traditional protected areas. For long, biodiversity conservation and crop productivity have been seen as mutually exclusive options. Here, we use a unique dataset that includes annual monitoring of 12,300 permanent 2...