Mar Sobral

University of Santiago de Compostela | USC · Geography

Intra-individual trait variation in plants represents an often ignored but important dimension of phenotypic variation that contributes to functional diversity and the dynamics of ecological communities. It can be expressed differently across plant traits, but the induction of intra-individual variation in different trait types under environmental...

The study of trophic interactions might be key to understanding the distribution of species on Earth. Particularly, the biogeography of heterotrophic species-such as mammals-could be strongly driven by trophic interactions (diet). Here, we map and discuss the division of dietary strategies (herbivory, frugivory, carnivory, etc.) of terrestrial mamm...

ECOSISTEMAS consolidates its commitment to an open and fair publishing system and moves towards its internationalization

Acknowledgement to reviewers and guest editors of ECOSISTEMAS in the year 2023

Interactions between plants and herbivores are central in most ecosystems, but their strength is highly variable. The amount of variability within a system is thought to influence most aspects of plant-herbivore biology, from ecological stability to plant defense evolution. Our understanding of what influences variability, however, is limited by sp...

Plant subindividual trait variation is a neglected level of functional diversity that contributes to the variation of phenotypes and ecological communities. Disregarding the role of subindividual functional diversity (SFD) in nature may lead to incorrect understanding of spatial and temporal scales of relationships between trait diversity, ecosyste...

Mammal diversity affects carbon concentration in Amazonian soils. It is known that some species traits determine carbon accumulation in organisms (e.g., size and longevity), and are also related to feeding strategies, thus linking species traits to the type of organic remains that are incorporated into the soil. Trait diversity in mammal assemblage...

Women (and all gender-discriminated people) are underrepresented in science, especially in leadership positions and higher stages of the scientific career. One of the main causes of career abandonment by women is maternity, with many women leaving Academia after having their first child because of the career penalties associated with motherhood. Th...

Ecological Monographsis going through some important changes, and 2023 will be a transformative year with the crea-tion of a brand-new board of editors. We have recently welcomed Mar Sobral as our new Associate Editor-in-Chief,Matthias Schleuning as our new Editor of Concepts & Synthesis, and Mariano Rodriguez-Cabal as a Subject-matterEditor who wi...

Trait evolution is shaped by carbon economics at the organismal level. Here, we expand this idea to the ecosystem level and show how the trait diversity of ecological communities influences the carbon cycle. Systematic shifts in trait diversity will likely trigger changes in the carbon cycle.

Diversity of plants and animals influence soil carbon through their contributions to soil organic matter (SOM). However, we do not know whether mammal and tree communities affect SOM composition in the same manner. This question is relevant because not all forms of carbon are equally resistant to mineralization by microbes and thus, relevant to car...

Plant plastic responses to environmental variation, at scales smaller than the individual plant size, promote phenotypic and epigenetic diversity among repeated structures within genotypes. Different epigenetic marks in the somatic line can translate to the germline and seeds, generating a fitness patchwork in the progeny with unexplored effects on...

Despite the recent discoveries on how DNA methylation could help plants to adapt to changing environments, the relationship between epigenetics and climate change or invasion in new areas is still poorly known. Here, we investigated, through a field experiment, how the new expected climate scenarios for Southern Europe, i.e., increased temperature...

Investigamos se a riqueza e a abundancia de aves cambiaron no Courel tras un período de 37 anos. Medimos a diversidade de aves en dous soutos, un bosque de montaña, un aciñeiral e unha matogueira, nos mesmos lugares e coa mesma metodoloxía en xullo de 1977 e xullo de 2014. En total, rexistramos 31 especies de aves. O noso estudo non mostra cambios...

All traits are functional Invited presentation to Centro de Investigaciones sobre Desertificación, CSIC

Significance Herbivore attack on plants is known to elicit defensive responses. Such environmentally induced responses can also be expressed by the offspring of attacked plants via DNA methylation—an epigenetic response—but little is known about if and how epigenetic induction varies with plant ontogeny (e.g., seedlings, reproductive plants). Here,...

There is increasing confusion regarding the term ‘functional trait’ and its links with ecosystem functioning. Functional traits are defined as traits that affect individual fitness. I use an evolutionary rationale that considers the integration of the phenotype, the environmental variation, and the relationship between both, to propose that all tra...

Variation in flower color due to transgenerational plasticity could stem directly from abiotic or biotic environmental conditions. Finding a link between biotic ecological interactions across generations and plasticity in flower color would indicate that transgenerational effects of ecological interactions, such as herbivory, might be involved in f...

This article shows that the number of different kinds of mammals and their interactions affect the way carbon, an element essential for life, moves between plants, animals, and the environment in the Amazon. It was already known that plant biodiversity affects this cycling of carbon, and some scientists had suggested this relationship might be true...

O cambio global ameaza a biodiversidade, principalmente a través de cambios no clima e no uso da terra. O uso da terra pode afectar a di-versidade de especies en paisaxes dominadas por humanos. As terras agrícolas están sendo abandonadas en moitas rexións de Europa por causa do despoboamento do medio rural (1). Este abandono é seguido polo crecemen...

Restoration of natural ecosystems has traditionally focused on recovering specific richness to recover ecosystem functionality. However, species within a natural ecosystem are not isolated, they interact with others forming complex ecological networks. We know that human activities (such as selective logging or agriculture expansion) modify the str...

Aim - Dietary strategies are key to understanding species’ resource use, relationships with environment and biotic interactions. We aimed to identify the major strategies that shape birds’ diet space, and to investigate their spatial distributions in association with biogeographic, bioclimatic and anthropogenic drivers. Location - Global. Time pe...

Divulgación, ecoloxía e ecoloxismo en galego

Land use affects diversity in human-dominated landscape mosaics. Thus, bird species richness may be affected by the balance between agriculture and rural abandonment in long-term human-dominated landscapes. We explored whether land abandonment is related to species richness and abundance of birds in a rural area of SW Europe. We conducted avian poi...

Species richness of plants and birds, and the abundances of birds, were estimated in four Eucalyptus plantations and four Oak forests in an area of 455 km2 in NW Spain. The number of plant species was higher in the Oak forests than in the Eucalyptus plantations (98 vs 53 spp.). The Oak forest with less species of plants (52 spp.) was much richer th...

Mammal diversity influences the carbon cycle through trophic interactions in the Amazon

Presentation on my project Subindividual variation as an adaptive trait

Presentation on the subindividual variation as an adaptive trait project

Didactic document (in Spanish) showing the relationship between mammals and the carbon cycle. Aimed to be used by highschool biology teachers. Transfer of recent scientific knowledge from academia to highschool students in spanish speaking countries.

Herbivore damage can induce anti-herbivore traits in plants. However, there is little data regarding how these induced traits affect a plant's palatability (an important factor in determining the likelihood and magnitude of herbivore damage) across multiple generations post-induction, or whether the effect of transgenerational induction differs bet...

Biodiversity affects many ecosystem functions and services, including carbon cycling and retention. While it is known that the efficiency of carbon capture and biomass production by ecological communities increases with species diversity, the role of vertebrate animals in the carbon cycle remains undocumented. Here, we use an extensive dataset coll...

In the version of this Article originally published, the surname of Ted K. Raab was misspelt. This error has now been corrected in all versions of the Article.

Outreach video created by us on the results of our paper Mammal diversity influences the carbon cycle trough trophic interactions in the Amazon ISAN 0000-0004-9A36-0000-O-0000-0000-2. 2017

Background The adaptive maintenance of flower color variation is frequently attributed to pollinators partly because they preferentially visit certain flower phenotypes. We tested whether Gentiana lutea —which shows a flower color variation (from orange to yellow) in the Cantabrian Mountains range (north of Spain)—is locally adapted to the pollinat...

Angiosperms diversification was primarily driven by pollinator agents, but non-pollinator agents also promoted floral evolution. Gentiana lutea shows pollinator driven flower color variation in NW Spain. We test whether insect herbivores and livestock, which frequently feed in G.lutea , play a role in G. lutea flower color variation, by answering t...

PhD DISSERTATION 2010. EVOLUTIONARY ECOLOGY OF SEED DISPERSAL AND SEED PREDATION IN CRATAEGUS MONOGYNA (HAWTHORN)

Angiosperms diversification was primarily driven by pollinator agents, but non-pollinator agents also promoted floral evolution. Gentiana lutea shows pollinator driven flower color variation in NW Spain. We test whether insect herbivores and livestock, which frequently feed in G.lutea , play a role in G. lutea flower color variation, by answering t...

In Gentiana lutea two varieties are described: G. lutea var. aurantiaca with orange corolla colors and G. lutea var. lutea with yellow corolla colors. Both color varieties co-occur in NW Spain, and pollinators select flower color in this species. It is not known whether a hybridization barrier exists between these G. lutea color varieties. We aim t...

Background: Flower colour variation among populations may result from the spatial variation of selective agents. The structure of phenotypic variation informs on the ecological processes related to this variation. Variation in floral traits is mainly attributed to variation in the pollinator fauna, while variation in vegetative traits is usually li...

Flower color variation among plant populations might reflect adaptation to local conditions such as the interacting animal community. In the northwest Iberian Peninsula, flower color of Gentiana lutea varies longitudinally among populations, ranging from orange to yellow. We explored whether flower color is locally adapted and the role of pollinato...

Animals which interact with plants often cause selective pressures on plant traits. Flower color variation within a species might be shaped by the action of animals feeding on the plant species. Pollinators might exert natural selection on color if flower color is related to their foraging efficiency. For example, some pollinator species might requ...

Oak woodlands of Mediterranean ecosystems, a major component of biodiversity hotspots in Europe and North America, have undergone significant land-use change in recent centuries, including an increase in grazing intensity due to the widespread presence of cattle. Simultaneously, a decrease in oak regeneration has been observed, suggesting a link be...

Subindividual variation among repeated organs in plants constitutes an overlooked level of variation in phenotypic selection studies, despite being a major component of phenotypic variation. Animals that interact with plants could be selective agents on subindividual variation. This study examines selective pressures exerted during post-dispersal s...

Individual plants produce repeated structures such as leaves, flowers or fruits, which, although belonging to the same genotype, are not phenotypically identical. Such subindividual variation reflects the potential of individual genotypes to vary with micro-environmental conditions. Furthermore, variation in organ traits imposes costs to foraging a...

Se puede esperar que las aves frugívoras maximicen la ingestión de pulpa y, por lo tanto, que prefieran frutos más grandes. La experiencia y el aprendizaje pueden jugar un papel en la elección del tamaño de frutos y las especies también pueden tener preferencias innatas. Investigamos la preferencia del tamaño de frutos de Crataegus monogyna en indi...

Frugivorous birds are expected to maximize pulp ingestion and, hence, prefer large fruits. Experience and learning may play a role in fruit-size choices, and species may also have innate preferences. We investigated preference for fruit size of Oneseed Hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna) in wild and naive Eurasian Blackbirds (Turdus merula). The preferen...

Seed-dispersing birds can be expected to optimize their energy intake through fruit selection and hence exert a positive selection on fruit pulp content, that is to say, favoring big fruits with small seeds. On the other hand they may select both, average fruit size and its variation. We addressed this issue by analyzing the phenotypic selection ex...