Martha Lopezaraiza-Mikel

• PhD
• Professor at Universidad Autónoma de Guerrero

Climate change is expected to affect the morphological, physiological, and life‐history traits of plants and animal pollinators due to more frequent extreme heat and other altered weather patterns. This systematic literature review evaluates the effects of climate change on plant and pollinator traits on a global scale to determine how species resp...

Bees play a pivotal role as pollinators in crops essential for human consumption. However, the global decline in bee populations poses a significant threat to pollination services and food security worldwide. The loss and degradation of habitats due to land use change are primary factors contributing to bee declines, particularly in tropical forest...

Bees play a pivotal role as pollinators in crops crucial for human consumption. However, the global decline in bee populations poses a significant threat to pollination services and food security worldwide. The loss and fragmentation of habitats due to land-use change are primary factors contributing to bee declines, particularly in tropical forest...

Este manual se elaboró con el espíritu de sumar a los trabajos de diagnóstico y rescate ambiental de zonas afectadas por el huracán Otis en Guerrero. Se enfoca en la evaluación del suelo y la vegetación como componentes de los ecosistemas que proveen servicios ecosistémicos o contribuciones de la naturaleza que sostienen la vida en el planeta; por...

Spring water is important for human consumption, domestic use, agricultural activities, and ecotourism in the Buenavista de Cuéllar Aquifer (ABC), southern Mexico. The objective of this research was to assess the health risk from fecal coliforms, as well as the non-carcinogenic risk to human health for different age groups, by studying the oral and...

Plant‐pollinator interactions are fundamental to ecosystem functioning; however, the role that succession and phenology have on these interactions is poorly understood, particularly in endangered tropical ecosystems. In highly diverse ecosystems such as tropical dry forests (TDF), variation in water and food availability determines the life cycles...

The biological control using organisms that inhibit growth or the appearance of pests or diseases has proven to be a successful alternative for mango disease control. In this work, in vitro analyses were carried out with Bacillus licheniformis M2–7 and B. licheniformis LYA12 strain derived from M2–7 against the phytopathogenic fungi Aspergillus ory...

The concentration of As, Pb, Cd, Zn, Fe, Mn, and Cu and the Sr and Pb isotopic compositions were determined in four species of the vascular epiphyte Tillandsia (T. caput medusae, T. ionantha, T. recurvata, and T. sp), to evaluate their capacity to biomonitor the air quality and the sources of lithogenic particles and toxic elements in a severely co...

Network analysis is a powerful tool to understand community‐level plant–pollinator interactions. We evaluated the role of floral visitors on plant fitness through a series of pollination exclusion experiments to test the effectiveness of pollinators of an Ipomoea community in the Pacific coast of Mexico, including: (1) all flower visitors, (2) visi...

It has been proposed that species‐rich insect communities and species turnover across landscapes enhance the pollination efficiency of crops through complementarity, where both the dominant and less abundant species contribute to reaching a yield threshold from pollination. Alternatively, fluctuations in the most abundant pollinator species, rather...

Fragmentation of natural habitats generally has negative effects on the reproductive success of many plant species; however, little is known about epiphytic plants. We assessed the impact of forest fragmentation on plant–pollinator interactions and female reproductive success in two epiphytic Tillandsia species with contrasting life history strateg...

Most hummingbird species are distributed in tropical lowlands and mountains with few species reaching the alpine environments of high mountain peaks. Field surveys were conducted in nine alpine sites across four of the highest volcanoes in central Mexico for three years to document hummingbird occurrence, habitat use, and some aspects of behavior....

In a recent literature review, we demonstrated that the evolution of floral traits is driven by adaptation to the most effective pollinators. In a critique of this study, Ollerton et al. 2015 claimed there were apparent flaws with data collection, analyses and interpretation of results. We disagree since many of OLT´s observations and recommendatio...

Convergent evolution of floral traits driven by pollinators has resulted in floral syndromes shared among different plant lineages. However, the flowers of many plant species are often visited by different pollinator groups, which apparently contradict the idea of syndromes. Here, we demonstrate that the most efficient pollinators consistently corr...

The evolution of self‐pollination has long been considered an adaptive strategy to cope with low or variable pollinator service; however, alternative reproductive strategies, such as generalized pollination (>1 pollinator functional group), may also ensure plant reproductive success in environments with inadequate pollinator visitation. Island–main...

Co-flowering plant species commonly share flower visitors, and thus have the potential to influence each other's pollination. In this study we analysed 750 quantitative plant-pollinator networks from 28 studies representing diverse biomes worldwide. We show that the potential for one plant species to influence another indirectly via shared pollinat...

In subdioecious populations, functional female, male and hermaphrodite individuals coexist. Subdioecy may be a transitional state towards dioecy or a breakdown of dioecy, although lability in sex expression may maintain subdioecy as a stable condition. To better understand the ecological aspects involved in sex ratio dynamics and breeding system ev...

The idea of pollination syndromes has been largely discussed but no formal quantitative evaluation has yet been conducted across angiosperms. We present the first systematic review of pollination syndromes that quantitatively tests whether the most effective pollinators for a species can be inferred from suites of floral traits for 417 plant specie...

Although under threat from natural and human disturbance, tropical dry forests are the most endangered ecosystem in the tropics, yet they rarely receive the scientific or conservation attention they deserve. In a comprehensive overview, Tropical Dry Forests in the Americas: Ecology, Conservation, and Management examines new approaches for data samp...

Background/Question/Methods Vascular epiphytes establish obligate, commensalistic interactions with their host plants (phorophytes). The fact that epiphytes have long life cycles, limited dispersal and depend on phorophytes, makes them one of the most vulnerable plant growth forms. Anthropogenic disturbances such as deforestation for land use con...

A central issue in ecology is the understanding of the establishment of biotic interactions. We studied the factors that affect the assembly of the commensalistic interactions between vascular epiphytes and their host plants. We used an analytical approach that considers all individuals and species of epiphytic bromeliads and woody hosts and non-ho...

Background/Question/Methods The biodiversity and level of endemism of tropical dry forests (TDF) in Mexico is high for many taxa and have been affected dramatically by human activities. The Chamela-Cuixmala Biosphere Reserve is one of the few natural reserves that protect TDF in Mexico. Around the reserve, vegetation cover has been fragmented and...

Understanding tropical forest succession is critical for the development of tropical forest conservation strategies worldwide, given that tropical secondary forests can be considered the forests of the future. Tropical dry forests (TDF) are among the most threatened tropical ecosystems, there are more secondary forests and forest restoration effort...

Studies of pairwise interactions have shown that an alien plant can affect the pollination of a native plant, this effect being mediated by shared pollinators. Here we use a manipulative field experiment, to investigate the impact of the alien plant Impatiens glandulifera on an entire community of coflowering native plants. Visitation and pollen tr...