About
71
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Introduction
With my current research I aim to predict how different terrestrial ecosystems actively respond to global environmental change. I focus mostly on plant ecosystems in drylands, savannas and Mediterranean forests. I am interested in studying the complex ecosystem dynamics emerging from plant-plant and plant-environment interactions, including the role of fires and drought under a changing climate.
Additional affiliations
June 2015 - December 2020
March 2012 - October 2012
March 2011 - May 2015
Publications
Publications (71)
The forest, savanna, and grassland biomes, and the transitions between them,
are expected to undergo major changes in the future due to global climate
change. Dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs) are very useful for
understanding vegetation dynamics under the present climate, and for
predicting its changes under future conditions. However, seve...
Aim
Although much tropical ecology generally focuses on trees, grasses are fundamental for characterizing the extensive tropical grassy biomes (TGBs) and, together with the tree functional types, for determining the contrasting functional patterns of TGBs and tropical forests (TFs). To study the factors that determine African biome distribution and...
Recent observations suggest that repeated fires could drive Mediterranean forests to shrublands, hosting flammable vegetation that regrows quickly after fire. This feedback supposedly favours shrubland persistence and may be strengthened in the future by predicted increased aridity. An assessment was made of how fires and aridity in combination mod...
The Amazon forest enhances precipitation levels regionally as trees take up water from the soil and release it back into the atmosphere through transpiration. Therefore, land-use changes in the Amazon affect precipitation patterns but to what extent remains unclear. Recent studies used hydrological and atmospheric models to estimate the contributio...
Across plant communities worldwide, fire regimes reflect a combination of climatic factors and plant characteristics. To shed new light on the complex relationships between plant characteristics and fire regimes, we developed a new conceptual mechanistic model that includes plant competition, stochastic fires, and fire-vegetation feedback. Consider...
[eLetter to Goessling et al. in Science https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq7280] ---
Goessling et al. (1) identify reduced low-level cloud cover as a key driver of recent climate warming but neglect the potentially critical role of forests and other land cover types in explaining this process. Forests influence low-level clouds throug...
The Lotka–Volterra system is a set of ordinary differential equations describing growth of interacting ecological species. One of the debated questions is understanding how the number of species in the system influences the stability of the model. Robert May studied how large systems may become unstable when species–species interactions do not vani...
Ecologists are being challenged to predict how ecosystems will respond to climate changes. According to the Multi‐Colored World (MCW) hypothesis, climate impacts may not manifest because consumers such as fire and herbivory can override the influence of climate on ecosystem state. One MCW interpretation is that climate determinism fails because alt...
We assembled the first gridded burned area (BA) database of national wildfire data (ONFIRE), a comprehensive and integrated resource for researchers, non-government organisations, and government agencies analysing wildfires in various regions of the Earth. We extracted and harmonised records from different regions and sources using open and reprodu...
Climate tipping elements are large-scale subsystems of the Earth that may transgress critical thresholds (tipping points) under ongoing global warming, with substantial impacts on the biosphere and human societies. Frequently studied examples of such tipping elements include the Greenland Ice Sheet, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (...
Facilitative interactions among species are key in plant communities. While experimental tests support the Stress Gradient Hypothesis (SGH) as an association between facilitation and stress, whether the shape of net effects along stress gradients can be predicted is controversial, with no available mathematical modelling approaches. We proposed a n...
In this work, we theoretically explore how litter decomposition processes and soil-borne pathogens contribute to negative plant–soil feedbacks, in particular in transient and stable spatial organisation of tropical forest trees and seedlings known as Janzen-Connell distributions. By considering soil-borne pathogens and autotoxicity both separately...
We assembled the first gridded burned area (BA) database of national wildfire data (ONFIRE), a comprehensive and integrated resource for researchers, non-government organisations, and government agencies analysing wildfires in various regions of the Earth. We extracted and harmonised records from different regions and sources using open and reprodu...
Climate tipping elements are large-scale subsystems of the Earth that may transgress critical thresholds (tipping points) under ongoing global warming, with substantial impacts on biosphere and human societies. Frequently studied examples of such tipping elements include the Greenland Ice Sheet, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, perm...
The theory of alternative stable states and tipping points has garnered substantial attention in the last several decades. It predicts potential critical transitions from one ecosystem state to a completely different state under increasing environmental stress. However, typically, ecosystem models that predict tipping do not resolve space explicitl...
The emergence and maintenance of tree species diversity in tropical forests is commonly attributed to the Janzen-Connell (JC) hypothesis, which states that growth of seedlings is suppressed in the proximity of conspecific adult trees. As a result, a JC distribution due to a density-dependent negative feedback emerges in the form of a (transient) pa...
Half of the world's livestock live in (semi-)arid regions, where a large proportion of people rely on animal husbandry for their survival. However, overgrazing can lead to land degradation and subsequent socio-economic crises. Sustainable management of dry rangeland requires suitable stocking strategies and has been the subject of intense debate in...
In this work, we theoretically explore how litter decomposition processes and soil-borne pathogens contribute to negativeplant-soil feedbacks, in particular in transient and stable spatial organisation of tropical forest trees and seedlings known asJanzen-Connell distributions. By considering soil-borne pathogens and autotoxicity both separately an...
The terrestrial water cycle links the soil and atmosphere moisture reservoirs through four fluxes: precipitation, evaporation, runoff, and atmospheric moisture convergence (net import of water vapor to balance runoff). Each of these processes is essential for sustaining human and ecosystem well‐being. Predicting how the water cycle responds to chan...
Across plant communities worldwide, fire regimes reflect a combination of climatic factors and plant characteristics. To shed new light on the complex relationships between plant characteristics and fire regimes, we developed a new conceptual, mechanistic model that includes plant competition, stochastic fires, and fire-vegetation feedback. Conside...
The terrestrial water cycle links the soil and atmosphere moisture reservoirs through four fluxes: precipitation, evaporation, runoff, and atmospheric moisture convergence (net import of water vapor to balance runoff). Each of these processes is essential for human and ecosystem well-being. Predicting how the water cycle responds to changes in vege...
Half of the world’s livestock live in (semi-)arid regions, where an important proportion of the population relies on animal husbandry for survival. However, overgrazing can lead to land degradation and subsequent socio-economic crises. Sustainable management of dry rangeland requires suitable stocking strategies and has been the subject of intense...
The terrestrial water cycle links the soil and atmosphere moisture reservoirs through four fluxes: precipitation, evaporation, runoff and atmospheric moisture convergence. Each of these fluxes is essential for human and ecosystem well-being. However, predicting how the water cycle responds to changes in vegetation cover, remains a challenge (Lawren...
Recurrent fires can impede the spontaneous recruitment capacity of pine forests. Empirical studies have suggested that this can lead to a prolonged replacement of pine forest by shrubland, especially if shrub species are pyrophytic. Model-based studies, however, have suggested that post-fire succession of pine forest under current climatic conditio...
Recent extreme wildfire seasons in several regions have been associated with exceptionally hot, dry conditions, made more probable by climate change. Much research has focused on extreme fire weather and its drivers, but natural wildfire regimes – and their interactions with human activities – are far from being comprehensively understood. There is...
Resilience to tipping points in ecosystems
Spatial pattern formation has been proposed as an early warning signal for dangerous tipping points and imminent critical transitions in complex systems, including ecosystems. Rietkerk et al . review how ecosystems and Earth system components can actually evade catastrophic tipping through various pathways...
Microbiomes have profound effects on host fitness, yet we struggle to understand the implications for host ecology. Microbiome influence on host ecology has been investigated using two independent frameworks. Classical ecological theory powerfully represents mechanistic interactions predicting environmental dependence of microbiome effects on host...
Oral presentation in the Symposium IX International Meeting FuegoRED2020: Post-fire restoration in a changing world: vulnerability and resilience of forest ecosystem to fire at The 12th European Conference on Ecological Restoration
Abrupt transitions leading to algal blooms are quite well known in aquatic ecosystems and have important implications for the environment. These ecosystem shifts have been largely attributed to nutrient dynamics and food web interactions. Contamination with heavy metals such as copper can modulate such ecological interactions which in turn may impa...
Identifying structure underlying high-dimensional data is a common challenge across scientific disciplines. We revisit correspondence analysis (CA), a classical method revealing such structures, from a network perspective. We present the poorly-known equivalence of CA to spectral clustering and graph-embedding techniques. We point out a number of c...
Increases in drought frequency in combination with overgrazing may result in degradation of (semi‐) arid ecosystems. Facilitative interactions between plants are a key mechanism in preventing degradation, but it is poorly understood how they respond to increased stress by combined drought and herbivory. In this study, we used an ecohydrological mod...
As planetary boundaries loom, there is an urgent need to develop sustainable equilibriums between societies and the resources they consume, thereby avoiding regime shifts to undesired states. Transient system trajectories to a stable state may differ substantially, posing significant challenges to distinguishing sustainable from unsustainable traje...
Effective management strategies are needed to control expansion of invasive alien plant species and attenuate economic and ecological impacts. While previous theoretical studies have assessed optimal control strategies that balance economic costs and ecological benefits, less attention has been paid to the ways in which the spatial characteristics...
Abrupt transitions leading to algal blooms are quite well known in aquatic ecosystems and have important implications for the environment. These ecosystem shifts have been largely attributed to nutrient dynamics and food web interactions. Contamination with heavy metals such as copper can modulate such ecological interactions which in turn may impa...
A low-cost restoration action in patchy drylands worldwide is the installation of obstructions (hereafter, resource sinks) to break runoff pathways and retain resources. Field-works have studied how the effectiveness of this action depends on the materials installed. However, the influence and effectiveness of the cover and spatial organization of...
One of the most challenging issues in Mediterranean ecosystems to date has been to understand the emergence of discontinuous changes or catastrophic shifts. In the era of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, which encompass ideas around Land Degradation Neutrality, advancing this understanding has become even more critical and urgent. The aim of...
Africa is largely influenced by fires, which play an important ecological role influencing the distribution and structure of grassland, savanna and forest biomes. Here vegetation strongly interacts with climate and other environmental factors, such as herbivory and humans. Fire-enabled Dynamic Global Vegetation Models (DGVMs) display high uncertain...
The potential for either pathogens or mutualists to alter the outcome of interactions between host species has been clearly demonstrated experimentally, but our understanding of their joint influence remains limited. Individually, pathogens and mutualists can each stabilize (via negative feedback) or destabilize (via positive feedback) host-host in...
Although it is well known that mean annual rainfall (MAR) and rainfall seasonality have a key role in influencing the distribution of tree and grass cover in African tropical grassy biomes (TGBs), the impact of intra-seasonal rainfall variability on these distributions is less agreed upon. Since the prevalent mechanisms determining biome occurrence...
Ecological theory suggests that coexistence of many species within communities requires negative frequency-dependent feedbacks to prevent exclusion of the least fit species. For plant communities, empirical evidence of negative frequency dependence driving species coexistence and diversity patterns is rapidly accumulating, but connecting these find...
En los últimos 15 años, 3 millones de hectáreas de bosques se han convertido en matorrales o pastizales en los países mediterráneos de la Unión Europea, siendo el fuego y la sequía los principales motores de esa deforestación. Se analiza la deforestación inducida por los efectos conjuntos del fuego y la sequía en tres escalas jerárquicas: resistenc...
Over the past 15 years, 3 million hectares of forests have been converted into shrublands or grasslands in the Mediterranean countries of the European Union. Fire and drought are the main drivers underlying this deforestation. Here we present a conceptual framework for the process of fire-induced deforestation based on the interactive effects of fi...
Over the past 15 years, 3 million hectares of forests have been converted into shrublands or grasslands in the Mediterranean countries of the European Union. Fire and drought are the main drivers underlying this deforestation. Here we present a conceptual framework for the process of fire-induced deforestation based on the interactive effects of fi...
Measurements of competition and facilitation between plants often rely upon intensity and importance indices that quantify the net effect of neighbours on the performance of a target plant. A systematic analysis of the mathematical behaviour of the indices is lacking and leads to structural pitfalls, e.g. statistical problems detected in importance...
How species richness relates to environmental gradients at large extents is commonly investigated aggregating local site data to coarser grains. However, such relationships often change with the grain of analysis, potentially hiding the local signal. Here we show that a novel network technique, the "method of reflections", could unveil the relation...
Arid and semiarid savannas are characterized by the coexistence of trees and grasses in water limited conditions. As in all drylands, also in these savannas rainfall is highly intermittent. In this work we develop and use a simple implicit-space model to conceptually explore how precipitation intermittency influences tree-grass competition and sava...
Model studies suggest that semiarid ecosystems with patterned vegetation can respond in a non-linear way to climate change. This means that gradual changes can result in a rapid transition to a desertified state. Previous model studies focused on the response of patterned semiarid ecosystems to changes in mean annual rainfall. The intensity of rain...
The forest, savanna, and grassland biomes, and the transitions between them, are expected to
undergo major changes in the future, due to global climate change. Dynamic Global Vegetation
Models (DGVMs) are very useful to understand vegetation dynamics under present climate, and to
predict its changes under future conditions. However, several DGVMs d...
The scarcity of water characterising drylands forces vegetation to adopt
appropriate survival strategies. Some of these generate water-vegetation
feedback mechanisms that can lead to spatial self-organisation of vegetation,
as it has been shown with models representing plants by a density of biomass,
varying continuously in time and space. However,...
Background/Question/Methods
The study of species richness at large extent along climate gradients is commonly investigated aggregating local site data at coarser grain, although this technique may introduce artifacts, such as introducing spurious species co-occurrences, or changing the steepness of the relationships between species richness and t...
Tree–grass coexistence is broadly observed in tropical savannas. Recent studies indicate that, in arid savannas, such coexistence is stable and related to water availability. The role of different factors (from niche separation to demographic structure) has been explored. Nevertheless, spatial mechanisms of water–vegetation interactions have been r...
Local soil water-vegetation feedbacks play an essential role in vegetation pattern formation in drylands. However, the impact of spatial vegetation patterning on atmosphere-soil water fluxes, and thus on vegetation-climate interactions, is still unknown, even though this issue is crucial to determine how much detail is needed in representing vegeta...
We study the interaction between climate and vegetation on an ideal water-limited planet, focussing on the influence of vegetation on the global water cycle. We introduce a simple mechanistic box model consisting in a two-layer representation of the atmosphere and a two-layer soil scheme. The model includes the dynamics of vegetation cover, and the...
Global change may induce shifts in plant community distributions at multiple spatial scales. At the ecosystem scale, such shifts may result in movement of ecotones or vegetation boundaries. Most indicators for ecosystem change require timeseries data, but here a new method is proposed enabling inference of vegetation boundary movement from one ‘sna...
The climate and the biosphere of planet Earth interact in multiple,
complicated ways and on many spatial and temporal scales. Some of these
processes can be studied with the help of simple mathematical models, as
done for the effects of vegetation on albedo in desert areas and for the
mechanisms by which terrestrial vegetation affects water fluxes...