Pablo A Marquet

Pontifical Catholic University of Chile | UC · Departamento de Ecología

We study the large-time behavior of an ensemble of entities obeying replicator-like stochastic dynamics with mean-field interactions as a model for a primordial ecology. We prove the propagation-of-chaos property and establish conditions for the strong persistence of the N-replicator system and the existence of invariant distributions for a class o...

In the Anthropocene, intensifying ecological disturbances pose significant challenges to our predictive capabilities for ecosystem responses. Macroecology—which focuses on emergent statistical patterns in ecological systems—unveils consistent regularities in the organization of biodiversity and ecosystems. These regularities appear in terms of abun...

Climate change is one of the most important drivers of ecosystem change, the global‐scale impacts of which will intensify over the next 2 decades. Estimating the timing of unprecedented changes is not only challenging but is of great importance for the development of ecosystem conservation guidelines. Time of emergence (ToE) (point at which climate...

This chapter analyzes the available information regarding the main drivers of global change operating in Patagonia, including climate change and its impact on biodiversity, the introduction of exotic species, change in land use and cover, and some emerging drivers of global change such as harmful algal blooms (HABs) and the increase in connectivity...

Aim: Primary cavity nesters (e.g. woodpeckers) act as ecosystem engineers by providing tree cavities to several vertebrates that use them as nests or refuges. Although diverse assemblages of primary excavators are assumed to increase the number of tree cavities, environmental factors can limit populations of primary excavators, thus weakening their...

Metastasis is a nonrandom process with varying degrees of organotropism-specific source-acceptor seeding. Understanding how patterns between source and acceptor tumors emerge remains a challenge in oncology. We hypothesize that organotropism results from the macronutrient niche of cells in source and acceptor organs. To test this, we constructed an...

In this study, we examine the long-term trajectory of violence in societies that inhabited the coast of the Atacama Desert in northern Chile using three lines of evidence: bioarchaeology, geoarchaeology and socio-cultural contexts (rock art, weapons, and settlement patterns). These millennia-old populations adopted a way of life, which they maintai...

Este documento de trabajo se centra en las bases de la ciencia física del cambio climático. Hace hincapié en indicadores que describen la naturaleza del cambio climático en la región, sus principales efectos en la actividad económica y en los asentamientos humanos, y la contribución de la región a las emisiones de gases de efecto invernadero. En l...

Energy is life’s main currency. Understanding the requirements, flow, and availability of energy among organisms then becomes synonym for our understanding of the sustainability of biodiversity. In this regard, metabolic scaling and coexistence theories have been pivotal in mathematizing the energy consumption by an organism and the energy transfor...

Frente al problema de escasez hídrica forzada por el cambio climático en Chile, particularmente en la zona norte del país, se han instalado plantas desalinizadoras de distintos tamaños, con varias más en proceso de estudio y evaluación. La masificación de esta tecnología nos plantea el desafío de planificar su desarrollo futuro tomando decisiones...

Here we present a global time-series of global forest above ground biomass from 2000 to 2019,analyzing spatiotemporal patterns of carbon balance, accounting for losses and gains. We generated a globalAbove-Ground Biomass (AGB) map for the year 2000 and assessed its correlation with different satelliteproducts. We generated a multi-year analysis of...

At present, there is no simple, first principles–based, and general model for quantitatively describing the full range of observed biological temperature responses. Here we derive a general theory for temperature dependence in biology based on Eyring–Evans–Polanyi’s theory for chemical reaction rates. Assuming only that the conformational entropy o...

El presente estudio implementa la hoja de ruta denominada “gran impulso para la sostenibilidad” propuesta por la CEPAL utilizando a Chile como caso de estudio. La ruta se genera adoptando una perspectiva de límites planetarios para calcular las brechas ambientales de Chile y con miras a la identificación de políticas públicas que fomenten el desarr...

Aim Addressing global environmental challenges requires access to biodiversity data across wide spatial, temporal and taxonomic scales. Availability of such data has increased exponentially recently with the proliferation of biodiversity databases. However, heterogeneous coverage, protocols, and standards have hampered integration among these datab...

Abstract Mechanisms that reliably and efficiently guide practitioners to find relevant evidence are urgent for conservation decision‐making in Chilean Patagonia. The objective of this study was to systematically collect, characterize, and synthesize the extensive evidence about conservation knowledge in Chilean Patagonia focusing on the impacts of...

Cushion plants are specialized keystone species of alpine environments that can have a positive effect on ecosystem structure and function. However, we know relatively little about how cushion plants regulate the diversity and composition of soil microbial communities, major drivers of soil processes and ecosystem functioning. Identifying what fact...

To meet the ambitious objectives of biodiversity and climate conventions, the international community requires clarity on how these objectives can be operationalized spatially and how multiple targets can be pursued concurrently. To support goal setting and the implementation of international strategies and action plans, spatial guidance is needed...

The Neolithic or Formative Period in the New World drastically transformed the mode of production in human societies with the domestication of plants and animals. It impacted the way of life and social relations among individuals in permanent farming villages. Moreover, the emergence of elites and social inequality fostered interpersonal and inter-...

Coastal urban areas have dramatically increased during the last decades, however, coastal research integrating the impacts and challenges facing urban areas is still scarce. To examine research advances and critical gaps, a review of the literature on coastal urban ecology was performed. Articles were selected following a structured decision tree a...

At present, there is no simple, complete, and first principles-based model for quantitatively describing the full range of observed biological temperature responses. Here, we derive a theory exhibiting these features based on the Eyring-Evans-Polanyi theory governing chemical reaction rates, and which is applicable across all scales from the micro...

The Mediterranean‐type climate region of Chile is a globally unique biodiversity hotspot but its protected area system does not adequately represent the biological diversity, nor does it provide equitable access to people. We explored options to expand the protected area system to cost‐effectively improve the conservation of forest ecosystem types...

We propose a stochastic model for interacting species in a metacommunity in order to study the factors affecting the intensity of the competition/colonization trade-off as a coexistence mechanism in metacommunities. We particularly focus on the role of the number of local communities and the number of refuges for the inferior competitor. The stocha...

Cancer is a singular cellular state, the emergence of which destabilises the homeostasis reached through the evolution to multicellularity. We present the idea that the onset of the cellular disobedience to the metazoan functional and structural architecture, known as the cancer phenotype, is triggered by changes in the cell’s external environment...

Top-down and bottom-up forces determine ecosystem function and dynamics. Fisheries as a top-down force can shorten and destabilize food webs, while effects driven by climate change can alter the bottom-up forces of primary productivity. We assessed the response of a highly-resolved intertidal food web to these two global change drivers, using netwo...

Aim: We still lack a consensus on the main variables driving changes in migratory strategies. Different hypotheses have been proposed: productivity, energy, environmental heterogeneity, and genetic predisposition. This work takes an integrative view and analyses migrations from a macroecological perspective estimating the extent to which different...

Top-down and bottom-up forces determine ecosystem function and dynamics. Fisheries as a top-down force can shorten and destabilize food-webs, while climate-change driven effects can alter the bottom-up forces of primary productivity. We assessed the response of a highly-resolved intertidal food-web to these two global-change drivers, using network...

1. Biodiversity loss is one of the current drivers of global change with an acute impact on community structure. Different measures and tools (e.g., simulations of extinction events) have been developed to analyze the structure of ecological systems and their stability under biodiversity loss, especially in complex settings with multiple interactin...

Biodiversity loss is one of the current drivers of global change with an acute impact on community structure. Different measures and tools (e.g., simulations of extinction events) have been developed to analyze the structure of ecological systems and their stability under biodiversity loss, especially in complex settings with multiple interacting s...

Ecosystems functioning is based on an intricate web of interactions among living entities. Most of these interactions are difficult to observe, especially when the diversity of interacting entities is large and they are of small size and abundance. To sidestep this limitation, it has become common to infer the network structure of ecosystems from t...

Limiting climate change to less than 2°C is the focus of international policy under the climate convention (UNFCCC), and is essential to preventing extinctions, a focus of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The post-2020 biodiversity framework drafted by the CBD proposes conserving 30% of both land and oceans by 2030. However, the combin...

Limiting climate change to less than 2°C is the focus of international policy under the climate convention (UNFCCC), and is essential to preventing extinctions, a focus of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The post‐2020 biodiversity framework drafted by the CBD proposes conserving 30% of both land and oceans by 2030. However, the combin...

Climate change research often relies on downscaled general circulation models (GCM), projections of future scenarios that are used to build ecological and evolutionary models. With more than 35 different GCMs widely available at a resolution of 10 km and finer, standardized methods to understand the differences among GCM projections in a region of...

Objectives: This article addresses evidence of violence imbedded in both soft and hard tissues from early populations of hunters, fishermen, and gatherers, known as the Chinchorro culture, who lived between 10,000 and 4,000 cal yr BP, along the coast of the Atacama Desert, one of the driest environments on Earth. Our study is aimed to test two hyp...

Fisheries are threatening marine biodiversity, but global warming might worsen their adverse effects due to an expected reduction in the global biomass of the most basal species of food-webs, plankton. We use an allometric trophic network model to analyze the independent and combined effects of small-scale artisanal fisheries and climate change on...

La submesa Cambio de Uso del Suelo (CUS) tuvo como objetivo compilar y presentar en un informe la evidencia científica disponible sobre los cambios de uso del suelo y sus impactos en relación con las opciones de mitigación del cambio climático. Esta submesa contó con la participación de más de 30 científicos de diversas áreas de las ciencias ambien...

de Investigación en Biodiversidad y Ambientes Sustentables (CIBAS). Ecological trophic networks may involve complex interactions where the loss of a single species could trigger a cascade of secondary extinctions. However, such effects are not easily analyzed or interpreted due to low resolution and different characteristics of the available networ...

Species loss is a non-random reality that worldwide ecosystems are living and the understanding of their consequences is a major challenge in ecology. In natural ecosystems, species are part of a complex network of ecological relationships. Hence, the loss of one species could trigger secondary extinction cascades difficult to predict. Therefore, i...

Species loss is a non-random reality that worldwide ecosystems are living and the understanding of their consequences is a major challenge in ecology. In natural ecosystems, species are part of a complex network of ecological relationships. Hence, the loss of one species could trigger secondary extinction cascades difficult to predict. Therefore, i...

Many multi-regional studies investigating how available habitat area, energy availability, and historical refugia drive freshwater fish diversity have emphasized Northern Hemisphere and tropical areas. Furthermore, while many such studies have examined diversity drivers on basin-scale species richness (i.e., gamma diversity), they typically have no...

Aim Mediterranean Chile is part of the five recognized mediterranean‐type climates in the world and harbours a very rich floral diversity. Climate change has been reported as a significant threat to its biodiversity. We used the flora of Mediterranean Chile to analyse how biodiversity patterns, as measured by phylogenetic diversity, genus and speci...

Small mammals present in areas where hantavirus cardiopulmonary syndrome (HCPS) cases had occurred in central and southern Chile were captured and analyzed to evaluate the abundance of rodents and seroprevalence rates of antibodies to Andes orthohantavirus (ANDV). Sampling areas ranged from the Coquimbo to Aysén regions (30-45° S approx.) regions....

Phenology of species, the coupling of vital activities to specific times of the year, plays a main role in ecosystem functioning and is expected to be affected by global change. We analysed the temporal structure of 52 amphibian communities in South America encompassing a latitudinal range from 7º to 34º south. Phenological modularity – species ten...

A tangled web of vicious circles, driven by cultural issues, has prevented ecology from growing strong theoretical roots. Now this hinders development of effective conservation policies. To overcome these barriers in view of urgent societal needs, we propose a global network of postgraduate theoretical training programs.

Fluctuations in biodiversity, large and small, pervade the fossil record, yet we do not understand the processes generating them. Here, we extend theory from nonequilibrium statistical physics to describe the fat-tailed form of fluctuations in Phanerozoic marine invertebrate richness. Using this theory, known as superstatistics, we show that hetero...

One strategy to address threats to biodiversity in the face of ongoing budget constraints is to create an enabling environment that facilitates individuals, communities and other groups to self-organise to achieve conservation outcomes. Emergence (new activities and initiatives), and robustness (durability of these activities and initiatives over t...

Uno de los mayores retos de la humanidad para el siglo XXI es cubrir la demanda de alimento ante una población mundial en crecimiento con recursos limitados y amenazada por el cambio climático. La agricultura es una fuente directa de alimentos y biocombustibles. Iberoamérica es hoy un polo de producción agraria en crecimiento y expansión. En las úl...

Larger volumes of sea ice have been thawing in the Central Arctic Ocean (CAO) during the last decades than during the past 800,000 years. Brackish brine (fed by meltwater inside the ice) is an expanding sympagic habitat in summer all over the CAO. We report for the first time the structure of bacterial communities in this brine. They are composed o...

The concept of the Anthropocene is based on the idea that human impacts are now the primary drivers of changes in the earth's systems, including ecological systems. In many cases, the behavior that causes ecosystem change is itself triggered by ecological factors. Yet most ecological models still treat human impacts as given, and frequently as cons...

"The Tarapacá Declaration" draws attention to the urgent need to change how human societies have been using water in the Atacama Desert, based on a historical trajectory spanning several millennia. The Declaration, an initiative that summarizes the results of the CONICYT/PIA, Anillo project SOC1405, is oriented towards civil society and various pol...

Regions with Mediterranean-type climate are characterized by both high species richness and high levels of endemism. From the five recognised Mediterranean-type climates in the world, Mediterranean Chile (MedCh) harbour some of the world’s richest biota and diversity at the genus level. In MedCh, climate change has been reported as one of the signi...

The objectives of the NetworkExtinction package is to analyze and visualize the topology of food webs and its responses to the simulated extinction of species

Co-occurrence methods are increasingly utilized in ecology to infer networks of species interactions where detailed knowledge based on empirical studies is difficult to obtain. Their use is particularly common, but not restricted to, microbial networks constructed from metagenomic analyses. In this study, we test the efficacy of this procedure by c...

PPEE is the penultimate global biodiversity crisis associated with drastic changes in ocean circulation patterns and marine productivity. However, the consequences of the PPEE across hemispheres remained unexplored. We evaluate how the energy use and guild structure of North (Florida) and South American (Chile) gastropod species assemblages are mod...

Ever since Paget's seed-and-soil and Ewing's connectivity hypotheses to explain tumor metastasis, it has become clear that cancer progression can be envisaged as an ecological phenomenon. This connection has flourished during the past two decades, giving rise to important insights into the ecology and evolution of cancer progression, with therapeut...

The frequency of genes in interconnected populations and of species in interconnected communities are affected by similar processes, such as birth, death and immigration. The equilibrium distribution of gene frequencies in structured populations is known since the 1930s, under Wright’s metapopulation model known as the island model. The equivalent...

The frequency of genes in interconnected populations and of species in interconnected communities are affected by similar processes, such as birth, death and immigration. The equilibrium distribution of gene frequencies in structured populations is known since the 1930s, under Wright’s metapopulation model known as the island model. The equivalent...

Biodiversity is sustained by and is essential to the services that ecosystems provide. Different species would use these services in different ways, or adaptive strategies, which are sustained in time by continuous innovations. Using this framework, we postulate a model for a biological species (Homo sapiens) in a finite world where innovations, ai...