Miguel A. Zavala

Miguel A. Zavala
University of Alcalá | UAH · Department of Life Sciences

PhD Princeton University

About

229
Publications
110,955
Reads
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13,366
Citations
Introduction
We develop and parameterize socio-ecosystem models across scales from individuals to region to understand mechanisms maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem function; to asses resilience and vulnerability and, to generate guidelines for sustainable use and adaptation to climate change. We collaborate with scientists from several disciplines; biology, mathematics, computer science and economics to develop an integrated systems view of the problem that can be transferred to stakeholders.
Additional affiliations
September 2000 - September 2002
University of Vigo
Position
  • Professor (Associate)
September 2011 - September 2012
Instituto Nacional de Investigación y Tecnología Agraria y Alimentaria
Position
  • Research Director
January 2001 - present
University of Alcalá
Position
  • Professor (Full)
Education
August 1996 - December 2020
Princeton University
Field of study
  • Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
August 1993 - August 2020
Princeton University
Field of study
  • Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
September 1986 - December 1992
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
Field of study
  • Forestry & Wildland Management

Publications

Publications (229)
Article
Full-text available
There is considerable evidence that biodiversity promotes multiple ecosystem functions (multifunctionality), thus ensuring the delivery of ecosystem services important for human well-being. However, the mechanisms underlying this relationship are poorly understood, especially in natural ecosystems. We develop a novel approach to partition biodivers...
Article
Full-text available
Significance Numerous studies have demonstrated the importance of biodiversity in maintaining multiple ecosystem functions and services (multifunctionality) at local spatial scales, but it is unknown whether similar relationships are found at larger spatial scales in real-world landscapes. Here, we show, for the first time to our knowledge, that bi...
Article
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Phenotypic traits and their associated trade-offs have been shown to have globally consistent effects on individual plant physiological functions, but how these effects scale up to influence competition, a key driver of community assembly in terrestrial vegetation, has remained unclear. Here we use growth data from more than 3 million trees in over...
Article
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Forests are major components of the global carbon cycle, providing substantial feedback to atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. Our ability to understand and predict changes in the forest carbon cycle-particularly net primary productivity and carbon storage-increasingly relies on models that represent biological processes across several scale...
Article
Studies suggest that populations of different species do not decline equally after habitat loss. However, empirical tests have been confined to fine spatiotemporal scales and have rarely included plants. Using data from 89,365 forest survey plots covering peninsular Spain, we explored, for each of 34 common tree species, the relationship between pr...
Article
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Rates of tree mortality are increasing globally, with implications for forests and climate. Yet, how and why these trends vary globally remain unknown. Developing a comprehensive assessment of global tree mortality will require systematically integrating data from ground-based long-term forest monitoring with large-scale remote sensing. We surveyed...
Article
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Following centuries of deforestation, many industrialized countries have experienced an increase in forest area and biomass due to changes in land-and forest-use since the mid-20th century. At the same time, the impacts of climate change on forests are aggravating, but the interplay between past land-and forest-use (i.e. land-and forest-use legacie...
Article
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Forests provide many ecosystem services that strongly depend on species diversity, as illustrated by the repeatedly observed diversity–productivity relationships (DPRs). These forest DPRs are assumed to result mostly from complementarity between species at the tree level whilst emerging community‐level processes remain poorly explored. In this stud...
Article
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Increasing water stress is emerging as a global phenomenon, and is anticipated to have a marked impact on forest function. The role of tree functional strategies is pivotal in regulating forest fitness and their ability to cope with water stress. However, how the functional strategies found at the tree or species level scale up to characterise fore...
Preprint
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Trees can differ enormously in their crown architectural traits, such as the scaling relationships that link their height and crown size to their stem diameter. Yet despite the importance of crown architecture in shaping the structure and function of woody ecosystems, we lack a complete picture of what drives this incredible diversity in crown shap...
Article
Although climate change is expected to drive tree species toward colder and wetter regions of their distribution, broadscale empirical evidence is lacking. One possibility is that past and present human activities in forests obscure or alter the effects of climate. Here, using data from more than two million monitored trees from 73 widely distribut...
Article
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The emergence of alternative stable states in forest systems has significant implications for the functioning and structure of the terrestrial biosphere, yet empirical evidence remains scarce. Here, we combine global forest biodiversity observations and simulations to test for alternative stable states in the presence of evergreen and deciduous for...
Article
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Context Global change is leading to more frequent and intense tree damage and mortality events. Drought-induced tree mortality is occurring worldwide leading to broad-scale events, but the spatial patterns of tree damage and mortality, their underlying drivers and their variation over time is largely unknown. Objectives We investigated the spatial...
Article
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Context Mediterranean managed dry-edge pine forests maintain biodiversity and supply key ecosystem services but are threatened by climate change and are highly vulnerable to desertification. Forest management through its effect on stand structure can play a key role on forest stability in response to increasing aridity, but the role of forest struc...
Chapter
Health Biology graduates could play a pivotal role in public health and human well-being, and the implementation of initiatives at the Ecology-Human Health interface has become critical to attaining Sustainable Development Goals. In this chapter, we describe the implementation of an educational innovation initiative within the “Ecology and Human He...
Preprint
Full-text available
Climate change is expected to drive species towards colder and wetter regions of their distribution with alternative processes such as forest management having the potential to alter species displacements. Here, using data from more than two million monitored trees from 73 widely-distributed species, we quantify changes in tree species abundance ac...
Preprint
The functioning and structure of most European forests are actively shaped by intensive human use. Harvesting of wood is one of the key processes of forest management, making it a crucial element to include in any large-scale analysis of forest ecosystems. Yet, our understanding of how forests are harvested across Europe is limited, as the true har...
Article
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Context West Mediterranean relict firs (Abies pinsapo Boiss. and Abies marocana Trab.) are closely related species threatened by global change. Government authorities in Morocco and Spain have established protected conservation areas around remaining fir groves but concerns linger regarding their effectiveness in light of emerging global environmen...
Article
Forest ecosystems with long-lasting human imprints can emerge worldwide as outcomes of land-use cessation. However, the interaction of these anthropogenic legacies with climate change impacts on forests is not well understood. Here, we set out how anthropogenic land-use legacies that persist in forest properties, following alterations in forest dis...
Preprint
Full-text available
Context. Mediterranean dry-edge pine forests maintain key ecosystem functions and supply services but are jeopardized by climate change. In the past, forest management has successfully balanced these demands but resilience under increasing aridity remains uncertain. Objectives. To assess landscape forest resilience under increasing aridity and thre...
Preprint
Full-text available
After centuries of deforestation, many industrialised countries are experiencing an increase in forest area and biomass due to changes in land- and forest-use since the mid-20th century. At the same time, the impacts of climate change on forests are aggravating, but the interplay between past land- and forest-use (i.e. land- and forest-use legacies...
Article
Full-text available
With climate change, natural disturbances such as storm or fire are reshuffled, inducing pervasive shifts in forest dynamics. To predict how it will impact forest structure and composition, it is crucial to understand how tree species differ in their sensitivity to disturbances. In this study, we investigated how functional traits and species mean...
Preprint
Full-text available
Context Land-use and climate change are leading to more frequent and intense tree damage and mortality events. Drought-induced tree mortality is occurring worldwide leading to broad-scale events, but the spatial patterns of tree damage and mortality, their underlying drivers and their variation over time is largely unknown. Objectives We investiga...
Article
Full-text available
Aim Linking local population dynamics and species distributions is crucial to predicting the impacts of climate change. Although many studies focus on the mean fitness of populations, theory shows that species distributions can be shaped by demographic stochasticity or population resilience. Here, we examine how mean fitness (measured by invasion r...
Article
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Previous attempts to quantify tree abundance at global scale have largely neglected the role of local competition in modulating the influence of climate and soils on tree density. Here, we evaluated whether mean tree size in the world’s natural forests alters the effect of global productivity on tree density. In doing so, we gathered a vast set of...
Article
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Drought-induced forest dieback can lead to a tipping point in community dominance, but the coupled response at the tree and stand-level response has not been properly addressed. New spatially and temporally integrated monitoring approaches that target different biological organization levels are needed. Here, we compared the temporal responses of d...
Preprint
Full-text available
Aim: Linking local population dynamics and species distributions is critical to predicting the impacts of climate change. While many studies focus on the mean fitness of populations, theory shows that species distributions can be shaped by demographic stochasticity or population resilience. Here we examine how mean fitness (measured by invasion rat...
Article
Full-text available
Preindustrial era agro-sylvopastoral land uses have influenced structure, function and disturbance in Mediterranean type mountainous landscapes for millennia. In this study we analyze through semi-structured interviews, stakeholder perceptions of coupled human and natural system (CHANS) community resilience in one such landscape; the municipality o...
Article
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Data capturing multiple axes of tree size and shape, such as a tree's stem diameter, height and crown size, underpin a wide range of ecological research - from developing and testing theory on forest structure and dynamics, to estimating forest carbon stocks and their uncertainties, and integrating remote sensing imagery into forest monitoring prog...
Article
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Tree‐ring data has been widely used to inform about tree growth responses to drought at the individual scale, but less is known about how tree growth sensitivity to drought scales up driving changes in forest dynamics. Here, we related tree‐ring growth chronologies and stand‐level forest changes in basal area from two independent data sets to test...
Article
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Forest structure is a key driver of forest functional processes. The characterization of forest structure across spatiotemporal scales is essential for forest monitoring and management. LiDAR data have proven particularly useful for cost-effectively estimating forest structural attributes. This paper evaluates the ability of combined forest invento...
Article
Aim The population processes that drive tree species distribution are still widely debated. We test the hypotheses that metapopulation processes of colonization and extinction are linked to predictions of species distribution models. Location Europe: Spain, France, Germany, Finland and Sweden. Taxon Angiosperms and Gymnosperms. Methods For 17 tr...
Article
Full-text available
Citation: Fernández-Manjarrés, J.F.; MacHunter, J.; Zavala, M.A. Forest Management, Conflict and Social-Ecological Systems in a Changing World. Forests 2021, 12, 1459. https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4907/12/11/1459
Chapter
The Mediterranean Basin is highly exposed to climate change, particularly to increased aridity and to more intense and frequent extreme climatic events such as severe droughts. Several temperate pine species have their southern distribution limit in the Mediterranean Basin, with low-altitude populations and dense, even-aged reforestations being esp...
Article
As global temperature and climate variability increase, overshoot droughts resulting from previously high plant growth could intensify climate–vegetation feedbacks.
Article
Full-text available
Forests are intrinsically coupled to human dynamics, both temporally and spatially. This evolution is conditioned by global changes in climatic conditions (teleconnections) and distant so-cio-economical processes (telecoupling). The main goal of this study is to describe the teleconnec-tions and telecoupling dynamics that have shaped structure and...
Article
Full-text available
Legacies of past climate conditions and historical management govern forest productivity and tree growth. Understanding how these processes interact and the timescales over which they influence tree growth is critical to assess forest vulnerability to climate change. Yet, few studies address this issue, likely because integrated long-term records o...
Article
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The prediction of tree growth is key to further understand the carbon sink role of forests and the short-term forest capacity on climate change mitigation. In this work, we used large-scale data available from three consecutive forest inventories in a Euro-Mediterranean region and the Bertalanffy–Chapman–Richards equation to model up to a decade’s...
Article
Forest dieback processes linked to drought are expected to increase due to climate warming. Remotely sensed data offer several advantages over common field monitoring methods such as the ability to observe large areas on a systematic basis and monitoring their changes, making them increasingly used to assess changes in forest health. Here we aim to...
Article
Aim Tree mortality is increasing world‐wide, leading to changes in forest composition and altering global biodiversity. Nonetheless, owing to the multifaceted stochastic nature of tree mortality, large‐scale spatial patterns of mortality across species ranges and their underlying drivers remain difficult to understand. Our main goal was to describe...
Article
Full-text available
Key message Competitive interactions change over time and their influence on tree growth is intensified during drought events in marginal Scots pine populations. Abstract Competition is a key factor driving forest dynamics and stand structure during the course of stand development. Although the role neighbourhood competition on stand dynamics has...
Article
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More tree species can increase the carbon storage capacity of forests (here referred to as the more species hypothesis) through increased tree productivity and tree abundance resulting from complementarity, but they can also be the consequence of increased tree abundance through increased available energy (more individuals hypothesis). To test thes...
Article
Full-text available
Species range limits are thought to result from a decline in demographic performance at range edges. However, recent studies reporting contradictory patterns in species demographic performance at their edges cast doubt on our ability to predict climate change demographic impacts. To understand these inconsistent demographic responses, we need to sh...
Preprint
Full-text available
Aim Tree mortality is increasing worldwide, leading to changes in forest composition and altering global biodiversity. Yet, due to the multi-faceted stochastic nature of tree mortality, large-scale spatial patterns of mortality across species ranges and their underlying drivers remain difficult to understand. Our main goal is to describe the geogra...
Article
Full-text available
Recent forest expansion in Euro‐Mediterranean countries predominantly results from secondary succession in abandoned farmland, rather than from artificial afforestation. This major forest transition involves the delivery of both ecosystem services and disservices, which must be balanced through new land‐use planning and policy approaches. Ecosystem...
Data
Code for computing in Maple13 the rill erosion-vegetation dynamic model proposed in Moreno de las Heras et al. (2011, ESP&L 36: 1367-1377): In this document we provide the Maple13 (Maplesoft, Waterloo, Canada) code that will enable other users to: (i) represent the phase diagram and the associated separatrix of the model, and (ii) obtain predictio...
Article
In long-living trees, the links between individual genetic diversity and fitness are not fully understood. Yet, the lack of information on the relationships between genetic diversity and radial growth in tree populations is alarming, particularly at species distribution limits given that these marginal populations are expected to be vulnerable agai...
Article
Full-text available
Abstract. Forest research has addressed the importance of an improved understanding of droughts -tocks interactions in the dry edge of tree species range. Nonetheless, more efforts are still critically needed to link up the multiple ways by which climatic stressors can trigger tree mortality, including population-level determinants and management....
Article
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Mediterranean holm oak forests are subjected to chronic seasonal droughts coinciding with the warmest conditions during the summer. Importantly, climate change projections support increased frequency and intensity of droughts in the future. In order to evaluate whether thinning practices can be used as efficient adaptation strategies to climate cha...
Article
Climate and forest structure are considered major drivers of forest demography and productivity. However, recent evidence suggests that the relationships between climate and tree growth are generally non‐stationary (i.e., non‐time‐stable), and it remains uncertain whether the relationships between climate, forest structure, demography and productiv...
Article
Aim Forest carbon storage is the result of a multitude of interactions among biotic and abiotic factors. Our aim was to use an integrative approach to elucidate mechanistic relationships of carbon storage with biotic and abiotic factors in the natural forests of temperate Australia, a region that has been overlooked in global analyses of carbon‐bio...
Article
Understanding species' tolerance to recurrent extreme droughts is key to predict species' performance and forest dynamics under ongoing climate change. Inter-specific differences in juvenile responses can largely shape forest composition and structure. However, the vulnerability of tree species is typically evaluated in adult canopy dominant indivi...
Chapter
We analyze drought risks to tree growth in Europe, using observations from forest stands covering a wide range of climatic conditions in France, Germany, Denmark, and Spain. The data consist of the time series of tree stem diameter and basal area. We employ a recently developed method of probabilistic risk analysis that formally decomposes the risk...
Article
Full-text available
Climate change is expected to cause major changes in forest ecosystems during the 21 st century and beyond. To assess forest impacts from climate change, the existing empirical information must be structured, harmonised and assimilated into a form suitable to develop and test state-of-the-art forest and ecosystem models. The combination of empirica...
Article
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The juvenile life stage is a crucial determinant of forest dynamics and a first indicator of changes to species' ranges under climate change. However, paucity of detailed re‐measurement data of seedlings, saplings and small trees means that their demography is not well understood at large scales, and rarely represented in forest models in detail. I...
Preprint
Full-text available
Species range limits are thought to result from a decline in demographic performance at range edges. However, recent studies reporting contradictory patterns in species demographic performance at their edges cast doubt on our ability to predict climate change demographic impacts. To understand these inconsistent demographic responses at the edges,...
Article
Full-text available
For decades, ecologists have investigated the effects of tree species diversity on tree productivity at different scales and with different approaches ranging from observational to experimental study designs. Using data from five European national forest inventories (16,773 plots), six tree species diversity experiments (584 plots), and six network...
Preprint
Full-text available
Aim Processes driving current tree species distribution are still largely debated. Attempts to relate species distribution and population demography metrics have shown mixed results. In this context, we would like to test the hypotheses that the metapopulation processes of colonization and extinction are linked to species distribution models. Loca...
Article
Full-text available
Research Highlights. This research highlights the importance of environmental gradients in shaping tree growth responses to global change drivers and the difficulty of attributing impacts to a single directional driver. Background and Objectives: Temperature increase associated with climate change might strongly influence tree growth and forest pro...