Mathias Pires

Mathias Pires
State University of Campinas (UNICAMP) | UNICAMP · Departamento de Biologia Animal

PhD

About

127
Publications
62,299
Reads
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4,277
Citations
Introduction
I'm interested in understanding how ecological interactions are organized in nature and how they shape the functioning of ecological systems affecting diversity at local and regional scales and in ecological and deep time.
Additional affiliations
March 2018 - present
State University of Campinas (UNICAMP)
Position
  • Professor (Assistant)
November 2015 - May 2016
University of California, Berkeley
Position
  • PostDoc Position
November 2014 - November 2014
Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina
Position
  • Lecturer
Description
  • Introdução ao Estudo de Redes Ecológicas
Education
March 2010 - March 2014
University of São Paulo
Field of study
  • Ecology
February 2008 - February 2010
February 2004 - January 2008

Publications

Publications (127)
Preprint
Full-text available
Crop pests threaten agricultural productivity, causing significant economic losses and food security issues. Although various control methods exist, pesticide reliance raises health and environmental concerns. In this sense, the Integrated Pest Management (IPM) is a favored approach that minimizes pesticide use while incorporating diverse pest cont...
Article
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Mutualistic interactions are key to sustaining Earth’s biodiversity. Yet, we are only beginning to understand how coevolution in mutualistic assemblages can shape the distribution and persistence of species across landscapes. Here, we combine the geographic mosaic theory of coevolution with metacommunity dynamics to understand how geographically st...
Article
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An often-overlooked question of the biodiversity crisis is how natural hazards contribute to species extinction risk. To address this issue, we explored how four natural hazards, earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, and volcanoes, overlapped with the distribution ranges of amphibians, birds, mammals, and reptiles that have either narrow distributions...
Article
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Extinção provocada por mudanças climáticas e por alterações no uso do solo pode impactar a relação entre espécies, afetando os chamados serviços ecossistêmicos, como controle de pragas e de vetores de doenças
Article
Most terrestrial large mammals went extinct on different continents at the end of the Pleistocene, between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago. Besides the loss in species diversity and the truncation of body mass distributions, those extinctions were even more impactful to interaction diversity. Along with each extinction, dozens of ecological interaction...
Preprint
Interactions between species, such as seed-dispersal interactions, can shape many aspects of those species’ life, as well as ecological patterns and evolutionary dynamics. Yet, sampling interactions in the field is challenging. Even with extensive sampling efforts we can hardly obtain a comprehensive picture of which species interact with each othe...
Article
Full-text available
Human-induced climate change has intensified negative impacts on socioeconomic factors, the environment, and biodiversity, including changes in rainfall patterns and an increase in global average temperatures. Drylands are particularly at risk, with projections suggesting they will become hotter, drier, and less suitable for a significant portion o...
Code
Raw data and code base for the research approach on climate change-driven biotic changes in tropical dry forest mammals in South America. Briefly, the code reproduces the traditional Ecological Niche Modelling (ENM) and the Ensemble of Small Models (ESM) framework; perform assemblage-level analysis in the resulting outputs; and build the figures us...
Preprint
Full-text available
Human-induced climate change has intensified negative impacts on socioeconomic factors, the environment, and biodiversity, including changes in rainfall patterns and an increase in global average temperatures. Drylands are particularly at risk, with projections suggesting they will become hotter, drier, and less suitable for a significant portion o...
Article
Full-text available
Indirect effects shape many aspects of our day to day life. While in social networks indirect effects drive our opinion and behaviour, in economical networks they affect the interdependence among global markets, and in contact networks they drive how contagious diseases spread. In this study we show that indirect effects can also shape one of the m...
Article
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Refugia‐based conservation offers long‐term effectiveness and minimize uncertainty on strategies for climate change adaptation. We used distribution modelling to identify climate change refugia for 617 terrestrial mammals and to quantify the role of protected areas (PAs) in providing refugia across South America. To do so, we compared species poten...
Chapter
The notion that biotic interactions affect how populations grow or decline and, as a consequence, whether they persist or perish has been central to the development of ecology and evolutionary theory. Darwin framed evolution as the outcome of intraspecific competition and highlighted the roles of interspecific interactions in driving adaptations. T...
Article
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Biodiversity loss not only implies the loss of species but also entails losses in other dimensions of biodiversity, such as functional, phylogenetic and interaction diversity. Yet, each of those facets of biodiversity may respond differently to extinctions. Here, we examine how extinction, driven by climate and land‐use changes may affect those dif...
Article
Full-text available
Linking local to regional ecological and evolutionary processes is key to understand the response of Earth's biodiversity to environmental changes. Here we integrate evolution and mutualistic coevolution in a model of metacommunity dynamics and use numerical simulations to understand how coevolution can shape species distribution and persistence in...
Preprint
Full-text available
Anthropogenic climate and land use changes are the main drivers of biodiversity loss, promoting a major reorganization of the biota in all ecosystems. Biodiversity loss implies not only in the loss of species, but also entails losses in other dimensions of biodiversity, such as functional diversity, phylogenetic diversity and the diversity of ecolo...
Article
Full-text available
Space and time promote variation in network structure by affecting the likelihood of potential interactions. However, little is known about the relative roles of ecological and biogeographical processes in determining how species interactions vary across space and time. Here we study the spatiotemporal variation in predator–prey interaction network...
Article
Full-text available
Speciation, dispersal and extinction govern the spatial and temporal dynamics of biodiversity. The fossil record offers the opportunity to directly estimate range expansion and contraction via dispersal and extinction, respectively. However, due to the incomplete occurrence record, determining the dynamics of these processes and the biotic and abio...
Article
Humans have reshaped the distribution of biodiversity across the globe, extirpating species from regions otherwise suitable and restricting populations to a subset of their original ranges. Here, we ask if anthropogenic range contractions since the Late Pleistocene led to an under‐representation of the realized niches for megafauna, an emblematic g...
Article
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Biodiversity contributes to the ecological and climatic stability of the Amazon Basin1,2, but is increasingly threatened by deforestation and fire3,4. Here we quantify these impacts over the past two decades using remote-sensing estimates of fire and deforestation and comprehensive range estimates of 11,514 plant species and 3,079 vertebrate specie...
Article
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en • Mammalian carnivores (order Carnivora) perform important regulatory functions in terrestrial food webs. Building a comprehensive knowledge of the dietary patterns of carnivorans and the factors determining such patterns is essential for improving our understanding of the role of carnivorans in ecosystem functioning. • In the Neotropics, there...
Article
Full-text available
Forecasting the effects of global change on biodiversity is necessary to anticipate the threats operating at different scales in space and time. Climate change may create unsuitable environmental conditions, forcing species to move to persist. However, land-use changes create barriers that limit the access of some species to future available habita...
Preprint
Forecasting the effects of global change on biodiversity is necessary to anticipate the threats operating at different scales in space and time. Climate change may create unsuitable environmental conditions, forcing species to move to persist. However, land-use changes create barriers that limit the access of some species to future available habita...
Article
Aim Global changes will redistribute biodiversity, reshaping ecological interactions and ecosystem processes. The decoupling in the distribution of plants and their mutualistic seed dispersers, for instance, may have overlooked eco‐evolutionary effects. How animal‐dispersed plants will respond to changes in the distribution of their seed dispersers...
Preprint
Full-text available
Worldwide extinctions of large terrestrial vertebrates in the late Pleistocene provide insight on how humans reshape ecological communities. Understanding the ecological causes and consequences of megafaunal extinctions requires integrating approaches to reconstruct the ecological communities from the past. Here, we combined archeological and paleo...
Article
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Article
Humans have fragmented, reduced, or altered the biodiversity in tropical forests around the world. Climate and land‐use change act synergistically, increasing drought and fire frequencies, converting several tropical rainforests into derived savannas, a phenomenon known as ‘savannization’. Yet, we lack a full understanding of the faunal changes in...
Article
Full-text available
The complexity of an ecological community can be distilled into a network, where diverse interactions connect species in a web of dependencies. Species interact directly with each other and indirectly through environmental effects, however to our knowledge the role of these ecosystem engineers has not been considered in ecological network models. H...
Article
Full-text available
Biodiversity loss is a hallmark of our times, but predicting its consequences is challenging. Ecological interactions form complex networks with multiple direct and indirect paths through which the impacts of an extinction may propagate. Here we show that accounting for these multiple paths connecting species is necessary to predict how extinctions...
Preprint
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Este é o primeiro relatório do Observatório COVID19 - Grupo: Redes de Contágio analisando os dados de óbitos da cidade de São Paulo. Neste relatório, integramos os dados de óbitos da cidade de São Paulo entre os dias 02/04/2020 e 28/04/2020 com informações sobre o fluxo de vítimas entre os hospitais e os cemitérios e crematórios da cidade de São Pa...
Technical Report
Full-text available
Este é o primeiro relatório do Observatório COVID19 - Grupo: Redes de Contágio – Laboratório de Estudos de Defesa para a região Sul do Brasil. Combinamos dados de casos confirmados do novo coronavírus (SARS-CoV-2) para o Sul, disponíveis até o dia 17/04/2020, com análises estruturais da rede de rotas rodoviárias intra e interestaduais para estimarm...
Preprint
Full-text available
Este é o primeiro relatório do Observatório COVID1920 - Grupo: Redes de Contágio – Laboratório de Estudos de Defesa para a região Nordeste do Brasil. Combinamos dados de casos confirmados do novo coronavírus (SARS-CoV-2) para o Nordeste, conforme disponível até o dia 02/04, com análises estruturais da rede de rotas rodoviárias intra e interestaduai...
Article
Full-text available
Understanding how ecological interactions have shaped the evolutionary dynamics of species traits remains a challenge in evolutionary ecology. Combining trait evolution models and phylogenies, we analyzed the evolution of characters associated with seed dispersal (fruit size and color) and herbivory (spines) in Neotropical palms to infer the role o...
Article
Full-text available
Niche theory suggests that the coexistence of ecologically similar species in the same site requires some form of resource partitioning that reduces or avoids interspecific competition. Here, from July 2013 to December 2015, we investigated spatial niche differentiation at three different scales of two sympatric congeneric spiders, Peucetia rubroli...
Article
Full-text available
Animal‐dispersed plants are increasingly reliant on effective seed dispersal provided by small‐bodied frugivores in defaunated habitats. In the Neotropical region, the non‐native wild pig ( Sus scrofa ) is expanding its distribution and we hypothesized that they can be a surrogate for seed dispersal services lost by defaunation. We performed a thor...
Article
Full-text available
Climate change will redistribute the global biodiversity in the Anthropocene. As climates change, species might move from one place to another, due to local extinctions and colonization of new environments. However, the existence of permeable migratory routes precedes faunal migrations in fragmented landscapes. Here, we investigate how dispersal wi...
Article
Full-text available
The structure of ecological interactions is commonly understood through analyses of interaction networks. However, these analyses may be sensitive to sampling biases with respect to both the interactors (the nodes of the network) and interactions (the links between nodes), because the detectability of species and their interactions is highly hetero...
Preprint
Full-text available
The complexity of an ecological community can be distilled into a network, where diverse interactions connect species in a web of dependencies. Species interact not only with each other but indirectly through environmental effects, however the role of these ecosystem engineers has not yet been considered in models of ecological networks. Here we ex...
Preprint
Full-text available
Niche theory suggests that the coexistence of ecologically similar species at the same site requires some form of resource partitioning that reduces or avoids interspecific competition. Here, we investigated the temporal and spatial niche differentiation of two sympatric congeneric spiders, Peucetia rubrolineata and P. flava, inhabiting Trichogonio...
Article
Full-text available
The functionality of distinct types of protein networks depends on the patterns of protein-protein interactions. A problem to solve is understanding the fragility of protein networks to predict system malfunctioning due to mutations and other errors. Spectral graph theory provides tools to understand the structural and dynamical properties of a sys...
Article
Full-text available
Trophic rewilding has been suggested as a restoration tool to restore ecological interactions and reverse defaunation and its cascading effects on ecosystem functioning. One of the ecological processes that has been jeopardized by defaunation is animal-mediated seed dispersal. Here, we propose an approach that combines joint species distribution mo...
Article
Full-text available
The Cretaceous/Palaeogene (K-Pg) episode is an iconic mass extinction, in which the diversity of numerous clades abruptly declined. However, the responses of individual clades to mass extinctions may be more idiosyncratic than previously understood. Here, we examine the diversification dynamics of the three major mammalian clades in North America a...
Article
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Network approaches to ecological questions have been increasingly used, particularly in recent decades. The abstraction of ecological systems – such as communities – through networks of interactions between their components indeed provides a way to summarize this information with single objects. The methodological framework derived from graph theor...
Preprint
Full-text available
The structure of ecological interactions is commonly understood through analyses of interaction networks. However, these analyses may be sensitive to sampling biases in both the interactors (the nodes of the network) and interactions (the links between nodes), because the detectability of species and their interactions is highly heterogeneous. Thes...
Preprint
Full-text available
Biological systems are organized as networks. A central problem in the study of biological networks is to understand if and how the network structure affects the fragility of biological systems to multiple types of perturbations. For example, the functionality and fragility of protein networks may depend on their network structure, and mutations an...
Chapter
Full-text available
The perception that the complexity of tropical ecological interactions is both a product of evolutionary processes and a feedstock for evolution lies at the origin of Evolutionary Ecology. We now have the opportunity to revisit this foundational perception to gain insight into the processes shaping biodiversity structure and ecosystem functioning....
Article
Full-text available
Understanding diet variation is a major concern when developing conservation guidelines for threatened species, especially for marine predators whose prey availability can be reduced by commercial fisheries. Diet can vary in geographically structured populations due to variation in prey availability and within a location due to the effects of seaso...
Article
Full-text available
For hundreds of millions of years, large vertebrates (megafauna) have inhabited most of the ecosystems on our planet. During the late Quaternary, notably during the Late Pleistocene and the early Holocene, Earth experienced a rapid extinction of large, terrestrial vertebrates. While much attention has been paid to understanding the causes of this m...
Article
Full-text available
Ecological interactions have been acknowledged to play a key role in shaping biodiversity. Yet a major challenge for evolutionary biology is to understand the role of ecological interactions in shaping trait evolution when progressing from pairs of interacting species to multispecies interaction networks. Here we introduce an approach that integrat...
Article
Full-text available
Rewilding encompasses management actions such as reintroductions and translocations with the purpose of restoring ecological processes and ecosystem functions that were lost when species were locally extirpated. The success of a species introduction is conditioned by multiple factors, in particular, ecological interactions. To predict the fate of t...
Article
Full-text available
The structure of ecological interactions is commonly understood through analyses of interaction networks. However, these analyses may be sensitive to sampling biases in both the interactors (the nodes of the network) and interactions (the links between nodes). These issues may affect the accuracy of empirically constructed ecological networks. We e...
Preprint
Full-text available
The structure of ecological interactions is commonly understood through analyses of interaction networks. However, these analyses may be sensitive to sampling biases in both the interactors (the nodes of the network) and interactions (the links between nodes). These issues may affect the accuracy of empirically constructed ecological networks. We e...
Article
Full-text available
Pleistocene extinctions affected mainly large-bodied animals, determining the loss or changes in numerous ecological functions. Evidence points to a central role of many extinct megafauna herbivores as seed dispersers. An important step in understanding the legacy of extinct mutualistic interactions is to evaluate the roles and effectiveness of meg...
Article
A longstanding debate in evolutionary biology and paleontology is whether ecological interactions such as competition impose diversity dependence on speciation and extinction rates. Here we analyze the fossil record of terrestrial mammalian carnivores in North America and Eurasia using a Bayesian framework to assess whether their diversity dynamics...
Article
Full-text available
Species phenotypic traits affect the interaction patterns and the organization of seed‐dispersal interaction networks. Understanding the relationship between species characteristics and network structure help us understand the assembly of natural communities and how communities function. Here, we examine how species traits may affect the rules lead...
Article
A great challenge in ecology and conservation biology is to deal with the inherent complexity of ecological systems. Because species are embedded in species-rich systems characterized by multiple interactions, it is often hard to identify which species are really important for ecological processes such as pollination. Here we show that species-rich...
Article
Full-text available
Networks provide one of the best representation for ecological communities, composed of many speecies with dense connections between them. Yet the methodological literature allowing one to analyse and extract meaning from ecological networks is dense, fragmented, and unwelcoming. We provide a general overview to the field, outlining both the intent...
Article
Full-text available
Biological networks pervade nature. They describe systems throughout all levels of biological organization, from molecules regulating metabolism to species interactions that shape ecosystem dynamics. The network thinking revealed recurrent organizational patterns in complex biological systems, such as the formation of semi-independent groups of con...
Data
Methodological approach to define a binary interaction in weighted networks. Color code corresponds to the strength of the interaction between elements. Hypothetical square adjacency matrices in which (A) the interactions between elements of a one-mode network are filtered off according to cut-offs (x) that range from 0.1 to 0.9 in interaction weig...
Data
Relationship between Unipartite Nestedness (UNODF) and size of theoretical nested one-mode networks. (A) UNODF and size (number of nodes, n) of perfectly nested networks. (B) Adjacency binary matrices (yellow cell = 1, blue = 0) of representative small networks (20 > n > 3) and their respective unipartite nestedness values among columns and rows (U...