Mónica Ladrón de GuevaraEstación Experimental de Zonas Áridas (EEZA-CSIC) · Desertificación y Geoecología
Mónica Ladrón de Guevara
PhD
About
33
Publications
6,222
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
421
Citations
Publications
Publications (33)
The interest in understanding the role of biocrusts as ecosystem engineers in drylands has substantially increased during the last two decades. Mosses are a major biocrust component that dominate its late successional stages. In general, their impacts on most ecosystem functions are greater than those of early-stage biocrust constituents. However,...
Biocrusts (topsoil communities formed by mosses, lichens, bacteria, fungi, algae, and cyanobacteria) are a key biotic component of dryland ecosystems. Whilst climate patterns control the distribution of biocrusts in drylands worldwide, terrain and soil attributes can influence biocrust distribution at landscape scale. Multi‐source UAV imagery was u...
Biocrusts, topsoil communities formed by mosses, lichens, liverworts, algae, and cyanobacteria, are a key biotic component of dryland ecosystems worldwide. Experiments carried out with lichen-and moss-dominated biocrusts indicate that climate change may dramatically reduce their cover and diversity. Therefore, the development of reproducible method...
Biocrusts are a combination of autotrophic and heterotrophic organisms including mosses, lichens, liverworts, cyanobacteria and algae that colonize arid and semi-arid areas of the Earth. Besides playing a critical role in the stabilization and development of drylands, biocrusts contribute appreciably (~7%) to the global carbon fixation. Nowadays, d...
Biocrusts, a combination of autotrophic and heterotrophic organisms including mosses, lichens, liverworts, cyanobacteria and algae are a key component of the semi-arid and arid regions of the Earth. Besides playing a critical role in the stabilization and development of drylands, biocrusts contribute appreciably (~7%) to the global carbon fixation....
Background
Biocrusts, communities dominated by mosses, lichens, cyanobacteria, and other microorganisms, largely affect the carbon cycle of drylands. As poikilohydric organisms, their activity time is often limited to short hydration events. The photosynthetic and respiratory response of biocrusts to hydration events is not only determined by the o...
Biocrusts are a critical biological community that represents one of the most important photosynthetic biomass pools in dryland regions. Thus, they play an important role in CO2 fluxes in these regions, where water availability limits vascular plant growth and development. The effect of biocrusts on CO2 fluxes was expected to be controlled by the i...
Supporting Information of the paper: Warming reduces the cover, richness and evenness of lichen-dominated biocrusts but promotes moss growth: Insights from an eight-year experiment
Despite the important role that biocrust communities play in maintaining ecosystem structure and functioning in drylands world-wide, few studies have evaluated how climate change will affect them. �
Using data from an 8-yr-old manipulative field experiment located in central Spain, we evaluated how warming, rainfall exclusion and their combination...
Soil surface communities dominated by mosses, lichens and cyanobacteria (biocrusts) are common between vegetation patches in drylands worldwide, and are known to affect soil wetting and drying after rainfall events. While ongoing climate change is already warming and changing rainfall patterns of drylands in many regions, little is known on how the...
Drylands ecosystems constitute one of the largest terrestrial biomes, and play a major role in determining the trend and interannual variability of the global carbon balance. It has been estimated that biocrust play an important role in the carbon and nitrogen fixation from the atmosphere at a global scale. In this work, we measured optical propert...
Soil surface communities dominated by mosses, lichens and cyanobacteria (biocrusts) cover most of the soil surface between vegetation patches in drylands worldwide, and are known to affect soil wetting and drying after rainfall events. While ongoing climate change is already warming and changing rainfall patterns of drylands in many regions, little...
Commercial chambers for in vivo gas exchange are usually designed to measure on vascular plants, but not on cryptogams and other organisms forming biological soil crusts (BSCs). We have therefore designed two versions of a chamber with different volumes for determining CO2 exchange with a portable photosynthesis system, for three main purposes: (1)...
Climate change is a component of the several planetary-scale shifts that are currently taking
place in the Earth system, which as a whole are referred to as global change. However,
climate, as a vector of energy and material fluxes, has the ability to interact with all the
elements (including natural and social components) of the Earth system, also...
The importance of biological soil crusts (biocrusts) for the biogeochemistry of drylands is widely recognized. However, there are significant gaps in our knowledge about how climate change will affect these organisms and the processes depending on them. We conducted a manipulative full factorial experiment in two representative dryland ecosystems f...
Dryland ecosystems account for ~27% of global soil organic carbon (C) reserves, yet it is largely unknown how climate change will impact C cycling and storage in these areas. In drylands, soil C concentrates at the surface, making it particularly sensitive to the activity of organisms inhabiting the soil uppermost levels, such as communities domina...
Biological soil crusts (BSCs) are specialized communities dominated by
mosses, lichens, liverworts, cyanobacteria, and other organisms that may
constitute as much as 70% of the living cover in dryland ecosystems.
These organisms not only fix CO2 from the atmosphere, but also control
the small-scale spatio-temporal soil CO2 fluxes in the ecosystems...
We analyze the distribution patterns of 15 species of amphibians in the province of Álava. For this objective, a presence/absence methodology was used with the observations mapped in UTM 5 x 5 km grids, and the relationship with different variables such as climatic, orographic and landscape were treated in a GIS (Geographical Information System). T...
This work evaluates the possibilities for estimating stomatal conductance (C) and leaf
transpiration (Trf) at the ecosystem scale from radiometric indices and surface
temperature. The relationships found between indices and the transpiration component
of the water balance in a semiarid tussock ecosystem in SE Spain are discussed. Field
data were co...
Projects
Projects (2)
DIAGRASS (April 2018 - March 2021) is a three-year project funded by Marie Curie Actions (Individual Fellowships). The general objective of this project is to evaluate the adaptation capacity of dryland grass species to short- and long-term changes in soil water availability. This project aims to improve our understanding of the effects of water availability on genetic expression mechanisms and their links with intra- and intergenerational phenotypic changes. This knowledge is necessary to evaluate critical dryland ecosystem services in the future, such as the stocking-density capacity.
This project studies the effects of climate change on the structure and diversity of microbial communities in semi-arid ecosystems at different spatial scales, as well as how these effects affect key ecosystem processes related to carbon and nitrogen cycles.
