
Maria J SantosUniversity of Zurich | UZH · Department of Geography
Maria J Santos
PhD Ecology
About
142
Publications
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Introduction
Maria J Santos currently works at the Department of Geography, University of Zurich. Maria does research in Environmental Science, Remote Sensing and Geography. Their current project is 'Historical Open Data.'
Additional affiliations
July 2010 - December 2011
September 2003 - August 2005
August 2001 - May 2003
Education
August 2005 - December 2010
August 2001 - May 2003
September 1992 - September 1998
Publications
Publications (142)
Navigating social‐ecological systems toward sustainable trajectories is an important challenge of the Anthropocene. Models of social‐ecological systems can increase our understanding of how social and ecological subsystems interact, their response to environmental changes, and how their dynamics may be altered by management interventions. However,...
Global biodiversity loss and climate change exacerbate feedbacks within social-ecological systems, i.e., between ecosystems, their services and well-being of human societies. Our ability to mediate these feedbacks is hampered by incomplete understanding of the underlying causal links, which could benefit from interdisciplinary approaches to discove...
Meeting restoration targets may require active strategies to accelerate natural regeneration rates or overcome the resilience associated with degraded ecosystem states. Introducing desired ecosystem patches in degraded landscapes constitutes a promising active restoration strategy, with various mechanisms potentially causing these patches to become...
Global change increasingly threatens nature, endangering the ecosystem services human wellbeing depends upon. Biodiversity potentially mediates these impacts by providing resilience to ecosystems. While biodiversity has been linked to resilience and ecosystem service supply on smaller scales, we lack understanding of whether mediating interactions...
Games as a didactic tool (e. g., puzzles) are gaining recognition in environmental education to promote skill development, but also to develop a specific understanding of the natural world. However, a children’s puzzle containing representations of nature may unwillingly lead to “misconceptions” of biodiversity themes and processes, and an over-sim...
The Arctic may be particularly vulnerable to the consequences of both ocean acidification (OA) and global warming, given the faster pace of these processes in comparison with global average speeds. Here, we use the Atlantis ecosystem model to assess how the trophic network of marine fishes and invertebrates in the Icelandic waters is responding to...
The onset of agriculture improved the capacity of ecosystems to produce food, but inadvertently altered other vital ecosystem functions. Plant traits play a central role in determining ecosystem properties, therefore we investigated how the onset of agriculture in Europe changed plant trait composition using 78 pollen records. Using a novel Bayesia...
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aim to elicit global mobilization to implement the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and are increasingly used in support of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). Previous studies have highlighted interdependencies between SDGs, with potential interactions between four Sustainability Domains: E...
Biodiversity conservation traditionally necessitates setting aside land, which frequently impacts local communities. Although progress has been made on how to optimize this process, conflict frequently emerges when conservation and community goals are at odds. Improving communication and community inclusiveness in decision‐making processes is stron...
Context
For many organisms, responses to climate change (CC) will be affected by land-use and land-cover changes (LULCC). However, the extent to which LULCC is concurrently considered in climate change vulnerability assessments (CCVAs) is unclear.
Objectives
We identify trends in inclusion of LULCC and CC in vulnerability assessments of species an...
Invasions by non-native plant species are widely recognized as a major driver of biodiversity loss. Globally, (sub-)tropical islands form important components of biodiversity hotspots, while being particularly susceptible to invasions by plants in general and vines in particular. We studied the impact of the invasive vine A. leptopus on the diversi...
Sumário dos resultados principais de um estudo realizado em Cabo Delgado, em 2019, que envolveu a recolha de informação junto de 210 agregados familiares, 14 chefes comunitários e 26 outros atores com atividades no parque.
Objetivos do Estudo
• Compreender se existe uma associação entre a vulnerabilidade das comunidades e uma maior exposição a i...
Human–wildlife interactions (HWIs) occur in many rural African communities, with potential impacts on livelihood vulnerability. High livelihood vulnerability may force communities to employ strategies that increase the risk of negative HWIs, yet the extent to which HWIs drive or are driven by vulnerability is unclear. We hypothesized that more vuln...
Atmospheric moisture recycling effectively increases the amount of usable water over land as the water can undergo multiple precipitation–evapotranspiration cycles. Differences in land cover and climate regulate the evapotranspiration flux. Forests can have deep roots that access groundwater facilitating transpiration throughout the dry season inde...
On the Caribbean island of St. Eustatius, Coralita ( Antigonon leptopus ) is an aggressive invasive vine posing major biodiversity conservation concerns. The generation of distribution maps can address these conservation concerns by helping to elucidate the drivers of invasion. We test the use of support vector machines to map the distribution of C...
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...
The growing needs for agricultural expansion and intensification will likely continue to reduce and fragment the terrestrial habitats fundamental to mammalian carnivores. Recent research identified benefits of agroecosystems to carnivores recognizing their multifunctionality, mostly for common species. However, the variability of carnivore ecology...
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...
Abstract The physiological significance of biometric body condition indices (bBCI) is poorly understood. We hypothesized that bBCI are composite metrics of nutritional physiology, physical fitness and health. To test this hypothesis, we first compared the performance of eight bBCI, using 434 Southern European carnivores from six species as a model...
Significance
The trend toward individual quota and discard bans presents a challenge for mixed fisheries: how to avoid widespread underutilization of quota due to choking effects of individual species for which quota is exhausted. Iceland’s demersal fishery has met this challenge using the most elaborate set of balancing mechanisms in the world. We...
Models of species’ distributions and niches are frequently used to infer the importance of range‐ and niche‐defining variables. However, the degree to which these models can reliably identify important variables and quantify their influence remains unknown. Here we use a series of simulations to explore how well models can 1) discriminate between v...
Agroecological practices have been shown to control erosion, increase soil fertility, carbon stocks, pollination and biodiversity. As a consequence, these ecosystem services can contribute to a better farm economic resilience on the long-term; however, empirical evidence is scarce. In this study we aim to understand the economic performance of agro...
Assessing patterns and processes of plant functional, taxonomic, genetic, and structural biodiversity at large scales is essential across many disciplines, including ecosystem management, agriculture, ecosystem risk and service assessment, conservation science, and forestry. In situ data housed in databases necessary to perform such assessments ove...
The spread of invasive alien species (IAS) is recognized as the most severe threat to biodiversity outside of climate change and anthropogenic habitat destruction. IAS negatively impact ecosystems, local economies, and residents. They are especially problematic because once established, they give rise to positive feedbacks, increasing the likelihoo...
The process of expanding a network of conservation areas includes identifying valuable areas for conservation, devising policies and implementing conservation actions on the ground. While the first two components are often analyzed in conservation science, the literature seldom focuses on the implementation process, particularly, how the governance...
Many studies have reported that the Arctic is greening; however, we lack an understanding of the detailed patterns and processes that are leading to this observed greening. The normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) is used to quantify greening, which has had largely positive trends over the last few decades using low spatial resolution sate...
Purpose
Despite increasing efforts to incorporate sustainability in curricula and practices of institutions of higher education, effective implementation remains challenging. The purpose of this study is to present an approach to incorporate sustainability into a practice-oriented research skills course, which was implemented at a small island stat...
The Amazon rainforest evapotranspiration (ET) flux provides climate-regulating and moisture-provisioning ecosystem services through a moisture recycling system. The dense complex canopy and deep root system creates an optimum structure to provide large ET fluxes to the atmosphere, forming the source of precipitation. Extensive land use and land cov...
Large-scale land use and land cover (LULC) changes can have strong impacts on natural ecosystems, such as losses of biodiversity and carbon. Future impacts, under one or multiple future scenarios, can be estimated with the use of LULC projections from land use change models. Our aim is to quantify LULC change impacts on carbon stocks and biodiversi...
Smallholder farmers might adopt different farming practices to cope with multiple stressors depending on their livelihood assets, and with varying environmental and economic outcomes. Ongoing global change is triggering stronger and different stressors that threaten conventional farming practices; however, this could be resolved if livelihood asset...
There is an increasing body of studies that show that land use intensification and homogenisation in agriculture landscapes, aimed at increasing food provisioning, decline other ecosystem services. Agroecological management has been proposed as an alternative to conventional agricultural management because of its presumed capacity to rehabilitate d...
Alexander von Humboldt was arguably the most influential scientist of his day. Although his fame has since lessened relative to some of his contemporaries, we argue that his influence remains strong—mainly because his approach to science inspired others and was instrumental in furthering other scientific disciplines (such as evolution, through Darw...
The Pan-Arctic has been observed to be "greening" or "browning" measured by increased or decreases respectfully in the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). These trends are observed on a large scale using coarse satellite imagery which is necessary to cover the large region and reduced data size. However, this comes with the caveat that t...
Biodiversity conservation requires space where conservation measures are implemented for a desired purpose. Setting land aside for conservation has been widely applied, while novel conservation modes (private–public partnerships, private multipurpose land management) may be fundamental to achieve conservation goals. We perform an economic analysis...
Aquaculture is central in meeting expanding global demands for shrimp consumption. Consequently, increasing feed use is mainly responsible for the overall environmental impact of aquaculture production. Significant amounts of fishmeal are included in shrimp diets, causing dependency on finite marine resources. Driven by economic incentives, terrest...
We modeled the natural resource demands of a transition to plant-based ingredients in shrimp feed formulations. In this study, feed formulation algorithms were used to create unique feed formulations per shrimp species, with intermediate declining steps of 20% fishmeal substitution by plant ingredients while accounting for the dietary requirements...
The Amazon rainforest evapotranspiration (ET) flux provides climate regulating and moisture provisioning ecosystem services through a moisture recycling system. The dense complex canopy and deep root system creates an optimum structure to provide large ET fluxes to the atmosphere forming the source for precipitation. Extensive land use and land cov...
The quota market is the instrument through which fishing operations under an individual transferable quota (ITQ) system achieve greater efficiency. It allows fishing companies to optimally configure their quota portfolios to their catches. Globally, fisheries corresponding to ~25% of landings have adopted ITQ systems. However, there is surprisingly...
Effective conservation capable of mitigating global biodiversity declines require thorough knowledge on species distributions and their drivers. A species ecological niche determines its geographic distribution, and species distribution models (SDMs) can be used to predict them. For various reasons, e.g., the lack of spatial data on relevant enviro...
The Amazon, and Neotropical forests, are one of the most important global biomes because of their extent and unique biodiversity, as well as their importance to global climate and as a habitat and resource for humans. Unravelling the influence of human presence on these forests is fundamental to our understanding of the biodiversity, ecosystem func...
Invasive species fundamentally change the bio-physical and ecological characteristics of the ecosystems they invade. Rapidly expanding invasive species may facilitate the spread of other invasive species, and successive invasion events may lead to novel species interactions that may push the system beyond its equilibrium state and change succession...
Invasive species are one of the main drivers of biodiversity loss. In the past decade, the development of environmental spectroscopy, both field spectrometers and airborne imaging spectrometers, has allowed progress in identifying individual species from remote sensing data. However, use of environmental spectroscopy for species identification need...
Mangroves are valuable ecosystems for coastal protection, carbon sequestration and storage, and they provide habitat, refuge and rearing areas for many important marine species. To control mosquito outbreaks in coastal regions, mangroves were often impounded and managed using a variety of techniques that ranged from the application of insecticides...
This study examines the use of green manure, no-tillage and compost to improve nutrient cycling and plant species richness. Therefore we conducted a full factorial design with four treatments in five almond plantations. The treatments include the business as usual management, conventional tillage (CT) and no-tillage (NT), compost (CM) and green man...
Oil spills from offshore drilling and coastal refineries often cause significant degradation of coastal environments. Early oil detection may prevent losses and speed up recovery if monitoring of the initial oil extent, oil impact, and recovery are in place. Satellite imagery data can provide a cost-effective alternative to expensive airborne image...
Tropical agroforestry systems provide a number of ecosystem services that might help sustain the production of multiple crops, improve farmers' livelihoods and conserve biodiversity. A major drawback of agroforestry coffee systems is the perceived lower economic performance compared to high-input monoculture coffee systems, which is driving worldwi...
Oil spills from offshore drilling and coastal refineries often cause degradation of coastal wetlands that can take a long time to recover. Early oil detection may prevent losses and speed up recovery if monitoring of the initial oil extent, oil impact, and recovery are in place. Satellite imagery data can provide a cost-effective alternative to exp...
Background
Different processes determine species’ geographic ranges, including species’ responses to changing climate, habitat, or both simultaneously. Here we ask which combination of factors best predicts shifts in the upper and lower elevation range limits and overall range of small mammal species in Yosemite National Park, California, USA acros...
With global science-policy conventions for biodiversity and ecosystem services in place, much effort goes into monitoring and reporting on the progress toward policy targets. As conservation actions happen locally, can such global monitoring and reporting efforts effectively guide conservation actions at subnational level? In this paper we explore...
Arctic tundra ecosystems are a major source of methane (CH 4), the variability of which is affected by local environmental and climatic factors, such as water table depth, microtopography, and the spatial heterogeneity of the vegetation communities present. There is a disconnect between the measurement scales for CH 4 fluxes, which can be measured...
Remote sensing (RS)—taking images or other measurements of Earth from above—provides a unique perspective on what is happening on the Earth and thus plays a special role in biodiversity and conservation applications. The periodic repeat coverage of satellite-based RS is particularly useful for monitoring change and so is essential for understanding...
Global demand for charcoal is increasing mainly due to urban population in developing countries. More than half the global population now lives in cities, and urban-dwellers are restricted to charcoal use because of easiness of production, access, transport, and tradition. Increasing demand for charcoal, however, may lead to increasing impacts on f...
Climate change adaptation reduces adverse effects of climate change but may also have undesirable environmental impacts. However, these impacts are yet poorly defined and analysed in the existing literature. To complement this knowledge-gap, we reviewed the literature to unveil the relationship between climate change adaptation and environmental im...
External actor interventions in community forest management (CFM) attempt to support communities with developing forest institutions and/or improving their livelihoods portfolio. Common pool resource (CPR) scholars argue that forest institutions are required to prevent overharvesting of the forest resource stock (appropriation dilemma), and to enco...
Coastal ecosystems are greatly endangered due to anthropogenic development and climate change. Multiple disturbances may erode the ability of a system to recover from stress if there is little time between disturbance events. We evaluated the ability of the saltmarshes in Barataria Bay, Louisiana, USA, to recover from two successive disturbances, t...