Nacho Villar

Nacho Villar
Netherlands Institute of Ecology | NIOO-KNAW

Postdoctoral researcher
Wildlife, Trophic cascades, Community assembly, Zoogeochemistry, Rewilding, Herbivores, Forests, Grasslands

About

37
Publications
30,104
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642
Citations
Introduction
Ecological dynamics & ReWildlife ecology in the Anthropocene I am interested in understanding how large wildlife regulates ecological dynamics at different levels of organization in different ecosystem types. I am currently working on: 1.Rewildlife ecology & Defaunation 2.Zoogeochemistry and climate-smart rewilding 2.Regulation of trophic interactions and community asembly by large wildlife 3.Coexistence and adaptation to the Anthropocene 4.Population regulation and demography under pressure

Publications

Publications (37)
Article
Full-text available
The urgent need to mitigate and adapt to climate change necessitates a comprehensive understanding of carbon cycling dynamics. Traditionally, global carbon cycle models have focused on vegetation, but recent research suggests that animals can play a significant role in carbon dynamics under some circumstances, potentially enhancing the effectivenes...
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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Foraging is essential for animal survival, as it provides the nutritional resources to sustain metabolism and all activities that animals undertake. Communal latrines are sites where multiple individuals of the same species defecate and can have multiple functions. Latrine behavior has been recorded in many animal species, including lowland tapirs...
Article
1. Natural enemies play an important role in controlling plant population growth and vegetation dynamics. Tropical rainforests host the greatest diversity of herbivores, from large mammalian ungulates to microscopic pathogens, generating and maintaining plant diversity. 2. By feeding on the same resources, large mammalian herbivores may interfere...
Article
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Herbivores and their predators have a major impact on restoration outcomes
Article
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Many angiosperms rely on vertebrates for seed dispersal via gut passage, an interaction that has been traditionally classified as a mutualism. The seed dispersal effectiveness (SDE) framework provides a mechanistic approach to evaluate evolutionary and ecological characteristics of animal‐mediated seed dispersal, by synthesising the quantity and th...
Article
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The world’s terrestrial biomes are broadly classified according to the dominant plant growth forms that define ecosystem structure and processes. Although the abundance and distribution of different plant growth forms can be strongly determined by factors such as climate and soil composition, large mammalian herbivores have a strong impact on plant...
Article
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How species persist in fragmented habitats is essential to understanding species resilience in response to increasing anthropogenic pressures. It has been suggested that expansion in dietary niche allows populations to persist in human‐modified landscapes, yet this hypothesis has been poorly tested in highly diverse ecosystems such as tropical fore...
Article
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The UN declaration of the Decade of Ecosystem Restoration 2021–2030 emphasizes the need for effective measures to restore ecosystems and safeguard biodiversity. Large herbivores regulate many ecosystem processes and functions; yet, their potential as a nature‐based solution to buffer against long‐term temporal declines in biodiversity associated wi...
Article
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Top-down control by large herbivores is a well-known driver of plant diversity structure and productivity. Yet, for forest ecosystems the sign and magnitude of herbivore control across resource gradients is not well understood. We conducted a series of replicated large herbivore exclusion experiments in defaunated and non-defaunated Atlantic forest...
Chapter
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The Atlantic Forest of South America hosts one of the world’s most diverse and threatened tropical forest biota. After five centuries of European human expansion, most Atlantic Forest landscapes are archipelagos of small forest fragments surrounded by open-habitat matrices. In this chapter, we describe the causes and consequences of large-scale def...
Article
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Tropical rainforests are populated by large frugivores that feed upon fruit‐producing woody species, yet their role in regulating the cycle of globally important biogeochemical elements such as nitrogen is still unknown. This is particularly relevant because tropical forests play a prominent role in the nitrogen cycle and are becoming rapidly defau...
Article
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In tropical forests, the diets of many frugivorous mammals overlap, yet how hyper-diverse assemblages of consumers exploit resources and coexist remains poorly understood. We evaluated competitive interactions among three species of terrestrial frugivorous mammals, the ungulate Tayassu pecari (white-lipped peccary), its close relative Pecari tajacu...
Article
Full-text available
In tropical forests, the diets of many frugivorous mammals overlap, yet how hyper-diverse assemblages of consumers exploit resources and coexist remains poorly understood. We evaluated competitive interactions among three species of terrestrial frugivorous mammals, the ungulate Tayassu pecari (white-lipped peccary), its close relative Pecari tajacu...
Article
Full-text available
Tropical forests hold some of the world's most diverse communities of plants. Many populations of large‐bodied herbivores are threatened in these systems, yet their ecological functions and contribution towards the maintenance of high levels of plant diversity are poorly known. The impact of these herbivores on plant communities through antagonisti...
Article
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Xenarthrans—anteaters, sloths, and armadillos—have essential functions for ecosystem maintenance, such as insect control and nutrient cycling, playing key roles as ecosystem engineers. Because of habitat loss and fragmentation, hunting pressure, and conflicts with domestic dogs, these species have been threatened locally, regionally, or even across...
Article
Full-text available
Xenarthrans—anteaters, sloths, and armadillos—have essential functions for ecosystem maintenance, such as insect control and nutrient cycling, playing key roles as ecosystem engineers. Because of habitat loss and fragmentation, hunting pressure, and conflicts with domestic dogs, these species have been threatened locally, regionally, or even across...
Data
Here we compile a data set comprising morphological and life history information of 279 mammal species from 39,850 individuals of 388 populations ranging from 5.83 to 29.75 decimal degrees of latitude and 34.82 to 56.73 decimal degrees of lon- gitude in the Atlantic forest of South America. We present trait information from 16,840 individ- uals of...
Article
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Measures of traits are the basis of functional biological diversity. Numerous works consider mean species-level measures of traits while ignoring individual variance within species. However, there is a large amount of variation within species and it is increasingly apparent that it is important to consider trait variation not only between species,...
Article
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The contribution of small mammal ecology to the understanding of macroecological patterns of biodiversity, population dynamics and community assembly has been hindered by the absence of large datasets of small mammal communities from tropical regions. Here we compile the largest dataset of inventories of small mammal communities for the Neotropical...
Article
Physiological traits can influence individual fitness and evolutionary changes in stress‐related physiological traits have been hypothesized to mediate the evolution of life‐history traits and trade‐offs. The hypothesis that such physiological variation could drive ongoing life‐history evolution requires non‐zero additive genetic variance in indivi...
Article
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2015. The cascading impacts of livestock grazing in upland ecosystems: a 10-year experiment. Ecosphere 6(3):42. Abstract. Livestock grazing is a major driver of land-use change, causing significant biodiversity loss globally. Although the short-term effects of livestock grazing on individual species are well studied, a mechanistic understanding of...
Article
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Grazing by domestic ungulates may limit the densities of small herbivorous mammals that act as key prey in ecosystems. Whether this also influences density dependence and the regulation of small herbivore populations, hence their propensity to exhibit multi-annual population cycles, is unknown. Here, we combine time series analysis with a large-sca...
Article
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In Mediterranean ecosystems, the European rabbit is a keystone species that has declined dramatically, with profound implications for conservation and manage-ment. Predation and disease acting on juveniles are con-sidered the likely causes. In the field, these processes are managed by removing predators, increasing cover to reduce predation risk an...
Article
Full-text available
Grazing by domestic ungulates has substantial impacts on ecosystem structure and composition. In grasslands of the northern hemisphere, livestock grazing limits populations of small mammals, which are a main food source for a variety of vertebrate predators. However, no experimental studies have described the impact of livestock grazing on vertebra...

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