Luis Borda de Agua

University of Lisbon | UL · Faculty of Science

Anthropization worldwide is increasingly homogenizing biodiversity, i.e., impoverishment of phylogenetic and functional diversity. This study aimed to assess plant phylogenetic relationships of riparian communities in anthropogenically disturbed and undisturbed sites across Continental Portugal. For the analyses, we used 947 species distributed in...

Ecological connectivity is key to maintaining a coherent and resilient network of protected areas in the EU. The EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 has identified the unhindered movement of species, nutrients and ecological processes across connected landscapes as a key feature of a coherent Trans-European Nature Network (TEN-N) of protected and con...

Functional Ecology conducted a randomised trial comparing single‐ and double‐blind peer review; a recent analysis of this data found substantial evidence for bias by reviewers. We show that this dataset can also be analysed for editor bias, after controlling for both reviewer bias and paper quality. Our analysis shows that editors tend to be more l...

Whether most species are rare or have some intermediate abundance is a long-standing question in ecology. Here, we use more than one billion observations from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility to assess global species abundance distributions (gSADs) of 39 taxonomic classes of eukaryotic organisms from 1900 to 2019. We show that, as sampl...

Dispersal of organisms is a ubiquitous aspect of the natural world, with wide implications across scales and organization levels. Interest in dispersal has risen sharply over the past 30 years, mostly due to the multiple and rapid global changes ecosystems face. Among the various aspects that may characterize a dispersion event, dispersal distance...

One of the aims of island biogeography theory is to explain the number of species in an archipelago. Traditionally, the variables used to explain the species richness on an island are its area and distance to the mainland. However, increasing evidence suggests that accounting for other variables is essential for better estimates. In particular, the...

Ecological communities change because of both natural and human factors. Distinguishing between the two is critical to ecology and conservation science. One of the most common approaches for modelling species composition changes is calculating beta diversity indices and then relating index changes to environmental changes. The main difficulty with...

Conservation science usually devotes little attention to common species, which are crucial in determining ecosystem structure and function. Dominant species are a particular type of common species that affect ecosystem functions proportional to their abundance or cover. In this study, we examined how human disturbance affects the cover of the domin...

The number of alien plant species is growing steadily across all world regions. These numbers tend to be exceptionally high in riparian ecosystems, often with substantial negative consequences for native species communities and ecosystem services provision. Here, we map the richness of invasive alien plant species in riparian ecosystems of continen...

Credible estimates suggest that a large number of the nearly 7000 languages in the world could go extinct this century, a prospect with profound cultural, socioeconomic, and political ramifications. Despite its importance, we still have little predictive theory for language dynamics and richness. Critical to the language extinction problem, however...

It is known that species’ distributions are influenced by several ecological factors. Nonetheless, the geographical scale upon which the influence of these factors is perceived is largely undefined. We assessed the importance of competition in regulating the distributional limits of species at large geographical scales. We focus on species with sim...

The distance decay of community similarity (DDCS) is a pattern that is widely observed in terrestrial and aquatic environments. Niche-based theories argue that species are sorted in space according to their ability to adapt to new environmental conditions. The ecological neutral theory argues that community similarity decays due to ecological drift...

Aim The road network is increasing globally but the consequences of roadkill on the viability of wildlife populations are largely unknown. We provide a framework that allows us to estimate how risk of extinction of local populations increases due to roadkill and to generate a global assessment that identifies which mammalian species are most vulner...

Road networks form the basic transportation system for most of the world's inhabitants, stimulating local and regional economies. Scientific advances in recent years have revealed that this vast, growing, planetary construction boom has been occurring mostly in non-urban environments, and most aggressively in developing frontiers of tropical region...

The distance decay of community similarity (DDCS) is a pattern that is widely observed in both terrestrial and aquatic environments. There are three major perspectives for explaining the DDCS. Niche-based theories argue that as environmental conditions change, species are sorted according to their ability to adapt to new environmental conditions an...

The species–area relationship (SAR) describes a range of related phenomena that are fundamental to the study of biogeography, macroecology and community ecology. While the subject of ongoing debate for a century, surprisingly, no previous book has focused specifically on the SAR. This volume addresses this shortfall by providing a synthesis of the...

Ecology, biogeography and conservation biology, among other disciplines, often rely on species identity, distribution and abundance to perceive and explain patterns in space and time. Yet, species are not independent units in the way they interact with their environment. Species often perform similar roles in networks and their ecosystems, and at l...

Biological collections, including herbarium specimens, are unique sources of biodiversity data presenting a window on the history of the development and accumulation of knowledge of a specific geographical region. Understanding how the process of discovery impacts that knowledge is particularly important for oceanic islands which are often characte...

Our main tenet is that biodiversity should be studied as a function of scale. The epitome of a similar approach was that of Mandelbrot in his studies on fractals. Although biodiversity patterns may not necessarily follow the mathematical description of fractals, we argue that much can be learnt if we adopt the perspective of studying biodiversity a...

The species abundance distribution (SAD) depicts the relative abundance of species within a community, which is a key concept in ecology. Here, we test whether SADs are more likely to either follow a lognormal‐like or follow a logseries‐like distribution and how that may change with spatial scale. Our results show that the shape of SADs changes fro...

Linear infrastructures (e.g. roads, railways or power lines) promote a myriad of negative impacts on wildlife around the world, of which direct mortality is the most visible one. When high mortality rates are found, mitigation measures are often discussed and applied. On the other hand, the lack of mortality is commonly interpreted as evidence of l...

Railway ecology is an emerging discipline. In this review, we focus on what is known today regarding the impacts of railways on wildlife, and on the methods to identify, monitor, and mitigate these impacts. Wildlife-train collisions are the most often reported impact, although railway lines can also represent barriers to animal movement, bisecting...

Understanding patterns of community structure and the causes for their variation can be furthered by comparative biogeographic analyses of island biotas. We used woody plant data at the local scale to investigate variations in species rarity, alpha, beta, and gamma diversity within and between three islands from the oceanic archipelagoes of Azores,...

One of the main tasks when dealing with the impacts of infrastructures on wildlife is to identify hotspots of high mortality so one can devise and implement mitigation measures. A common strategy to identify hotspots is to divide an infrastructure into several segments and determine when the number of collisions in a segment is above a given thresh...

Aim We aim to determine the relative influence of climate and species interactions on the global distribution of Soricinae and Crocidurinae shrews through the analysis of their distribution, climate niche and evolutionary history. Both subfamilies are partially allopatric in Eurasia, but in North America only Soricinae is present, thus providing a...

Islands harbour evolutionary and ecologically unique biota, which are currently disproportionately threatened by a multitude of anthropogenic factors, including habitat loss, invasive species and climate change. Native forests on oceanic islands are important refugia for endemic species, many of which are rare and highly threatened. Long-term monit...

Infrastructures in natural areas are expanding rapidly worldwide. Consequently, roads, power-lines, and wind-farms cause millions of fatalities across several animal groups. Assessing the population impact of these infra-structures requires sound estimates of the total number of fatalities. These estimates can be heavily biased due to differences i...

Which distribution commonly used to fit a species abundance distribution gives the best fit across several area sizes? We approach this problem by looking at the moments of the distribution and compare these with those the distribution based on empirical data on tree species collected in Barro Colorado Island, Panama. We conclude that no single dis...

Linear infrastructures, one of several forms of land-use, are a major driver of biodiversity loss. Roads impact populations at many levels, with direct road mortality and barrier effect contributing to decreased population abundance, higher isolation and subdivision, and therefore to increased extinction risk. In this paper, we compared the effect...

Unbiased scientific reporting is crucial for data and research synthesis. Previous studies suggest that statistically significant results are more likely to be published and more likely to be submitted to high impact journals. However, the most recent research on statistical significance in relation to journal impact factors in ecological research...

Supplementary resources of the article: A review of searcher efficiency and carcass persistence in infrastructure-driven mortality assessment studies

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book provides a unique overview of the impacts of railways on biodiversity, integrating the existing knowledge on the ecological effects of railways on wildlife, identifying major knowledge gaps and research directions and presenting the emerging field of railway ecology. The book is divide...

Railways play a major role in the global transportation system. Furthermore, railways are presently being promoted by several governments thanks to their economic and environmental advantages relative to other means of transportation. Although railways have clear advantages, they are not free of environmental problems. The objective of this book is...

As societies realise the importance of maintaining biodiversity and, accordingly, acknowledge the need for monitoring, minimizing and compensating the impacts of socioeconomic activities, including transportation, more scientists will be called to address these societal challenges. Railway Ecology is emerging in this context as a relatively new fie...

In this chapter we provide practical suggestions, together with examples, to identify, monitor and mitigate railway barrier effects on wildlife, as this is considered one of the railways’ greatest impacts. Railways can be both physical and behavioral barriers to wildlife movement, as well as disturbance to populations living close to them. Also, mo...

The coastal wet areas of Praia da Vitória (Terceira, Azores) were investigated to describe the ground and aerial (herbaceous and canopy) arthropod communities by comparing patterns of species composition, abundance and diversity. Three wet areas were studied: Paul da Praia da Vitória (PPV), Paul do Belo Jardim (PBJ) and Paul da Pedreira do Cabo da...

Species abundance distributions (SAD) are central to the description of diversity and have played a major role in the development of theories of biodiversity and biogeography. However, most work on species abundance distributions has focused on one single spatial scale. Here we used data on arthropods to test predictions obtained with computer simu...

Aim Land‐use change is a major threat to biodiversity globally. Roads cause direct mortality and limitation of individual movements, which may isolate populations and affect their viability in the long term. Here we provide the first comprehensive global assessment of the exposure of terrestrial mammalian carnivores to roads using an integrated mod...

1. Dispersal ecology is a topical discipline that involves understanding and predicting plant community responses to multiple drivers of global change. Propagule movements that entail long-distance dispersal (LDD) events are crucial for plants to reach and colonize suitable sites across fragmented landscapes. Yet, LDD events are extremely rare, and...

This article reviews existing models linking land-use change to biodiversity dynamics, both when native habitats are lost or when the landscape structure of countryside areas is modified. It covers both phenomenological models such as the species–area relationship and process-based models such as source-sink population models.

Species abundance distributions are an essential tool in describing the biodiversity of ecological communities. We now know that their shape changes as a function of the size of area sampled. Here we analyze the scaling properties of species abundance distributions by using the moments of the logarithmically transformed number of individuals. We fi...

Arising from F. He & S. P. Hubbell 473, 368-371 (2011). He and Hubbell developed a sampling theory for the species-area relationship (SAR) and the endemics-area relationship (EAR). They argued that the number of extinctions after habitat loss is described by the EAR and that extinction rates in previous studies are overestimates because the EAR is...

Numerous evolutionary studies have sought to explain the distribution of diversity across the limbs of the tree of life. At the same time, ecological studies have sought to explain differences in diversity and relative abundance within and among ecological communities. Traditionally, these patterns have been considered separately, but models that c...

Roads can have drastic impacts on wildlife populations. Although there is wide recognition of the negative impacts caused by roads and a wealth of practical studies, there is a lack of theoretical work that can be used to predict the impact of road networks or to implement mitigation measures. Here, using Skellam’s diffusion model, we develop analy...

New roads, agricultural projects, logging, and mining are claiming an ever greater area of once-pristine Amazonian forest. The Millennium Ecosystems Assessment (MA) forecasts the extinction of a large fraction of Amazonian tree species based on projected loss of forest cover over the next several decades. How accurate are these estimates of extinct...

We know that there are tens of millions of plant and animal species, but we do not know enough to be able to describe the patterns and processes that characterise the distribution of species in space, time and taxonomic groups. Given that in practical terms it is impossible to expect to be able to document biodiversity with any degree of completene...

study of the issue indicates that it is not a serious problem for neutral theory, for reasons we discuss below. First, a bit of background. Hubbell (2001) derived the analytical expression for the stochastic mean and variance of the abundance of a single arbitrary species in a neutral community undergoing immigration from a metacommunity source are...

Although fractals have been applied in ecology for some time, multifractals have, in contrast, received little attention. In this article, we apply multifractals to the species-area relationship and species abundance distributions. We highlight two results: first, species abundance distributions collected at different spatial scales may collapse in...

Although fractals have been applied in ecology for some time, multifractals have, in contrast, received little attention. In this article, we apply multifractals to the species‐area relationship and species abundance distributions. We highlight two results: first, species abundance distributions collected at different spatial scales may collapse in...

A magnetoplasma made up of a background of isotropic electrons and protons and a beam of anisotropic electrons (Tñ/T(i > 1), with drift velocity parallel to the ambient magnetic field, can feed different unstable modes. Numerical solution of the dispersion equation in the wavenumber plane (kll , kñ) reveals several unstable modes with islets of obl...

The wave and dispersion equations for perturbations propagating parallel to an ambient magnetic field in magnetoplasmas with nongyrotropic ion populations show, in general, the occurrence of coupling between the parallel (left- and right-hand circularly polarized electromagnetic and longitudinal electrostatic) eigenmodes of the associated gyrotropi...

Nongyrotropic particle populations can bring about linear mode coupling in homogeneous media among the three eigen-modes of parallel propagation in gyrotropic magnetoplasmas. These interactions stimulate, in general, wave activity that does not occur in corresponding (random gyrophase) gyrotropic ambients. Solutions of the dispersion equation illus...