About
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Introduction
My research focuses on the study of biodiversity from both ecological and evolutionary perspectives. I am interested in how ecological interactions, e.g. mutualisms, shape complex ecological systems. Interactions, such as those among plants and their seed dispersers and pollinators, are the wireframe of biodiversity, yet we are far from understanding how they evolve and coevolve. My main research tools include field ecology, molecular genetics, and theoretical ecology.
Additional affiliations
January 1993 - December 2012
January 2012 - present
Programa de post-graduação em Ecologia,
Position
- Professor
January 2008 - present
Universidad Pablo de Olavide-CSIC
Position
- Managing Director
Education
October 1980 - October 1984
Publications
Publications (346)
This book (11 chapters) presents an overview of seed ecophysiology and its role in shaping plant communities. Updated information on frugivory, seed dispersal, seed predation, light-mediated germination responses, chemical regulation of germination, and seed dormancy is provided. New chapter contributions include an overview of seed development, an...
Frugivores are highly variable in their contribution to fruit removal in plant populations. However, data are lacking on species-specific variation in two central aspects of seed dispersal, distance of dispersal and probability of dispersal among populations through long-distance transport. We used DNA-based genotyping techniques on Prunus mahaleb...
Assessing dispersal events in plants faces important challenges and limitations. A methodological issue that limits advances in our understanding of seed dissemination by frugivorous animals is identifying ‘which species dispersed the seeds’. This is essential for assessing how multiple frugivore species contribute distinctly to critical dispersal...
Some neotropical, fleshy-fruited plants have fruits structurally similar to paleotropical fruits dispersed by megafauna (mammals > 10(3) kg), yet these dispersers were extinct in South America 10-15 Kyr BP. Anachronic dispersal systems are best explained by interactions with extinct animals and show impaired dispersal resulting in altered seed disp...
Ecological interactions among species are the backbone of biodiversity. Interactions take a tremendous variety of forms in
nature and have pervasive consequences for the population dynamics and evolution of species. A persistent challenge in evolutionary
biology has been to understand how coevolution has produced complex webs of interacting species...
Mutualistic interactions among organisms are fundamental to the origin and maintenance of biodiversity. Yet the study of community dynamics often relies on values averaged at the species level, ignoring how intraspecific variation can affect those dynamics. We propose a theoretical framework for evaluating the extent to which various forms of varia...
Ecological interactions are a key component of biodiversity, essential for understanding ecosystem services and functioning. Recording and quantifying ecological interactions is challenging, frequently requiring complex logistics and substantial effort in the field. Camera traps are routinely used in ecology for various applications, and have prove...
Indirect interactions among species within ecological communities govern ecological and evolutionary processes as much as, or even more, than direct effects. In insect‐pollinated plant communities, indirect interactions between plants can be mediated by shared pollinators, and may influence plant fitness, population growth and community structure....
The study of mutualistic interactions among species has received considerable attention over the past 30 years. However, less is known about the structure of individual interaction configurations within species. Recently, individual-based networks have begun to garner more attention, as they represent the fundamental scale at which ecological inter...
Understanding how spatial patterns of mating and gene flow respond to habitat loss and geographical isolation is a crucial aspect of forest fragmentation genetics. Naturally fragmented riparian tree populations exhibit unique characteristics that significantly influence these patterns. In this study, we investigate mating patterns, pollen‐mediated...
The consequences of plant–animal interactions often transcend the mere encounter stage, as those encounters are followed by a chain of subsequent stages on the plant's reproductive cycle that ultimately determine fitness. Yet, the dissemination and recruitment stages of animal‐mediated seed dispersal are seldom analysed jointly, hindering a full un...
Ecologists have long recognized that seed dispersal mutualisms trigger natural regeneration and range expansion of animal‐dispersed trees. Yet we lack empirical studies addressing whether frugivore activity influences founder effects, which reduce genetic diversity at the colonization front of expanding populations.
Here, we evaluate the contributi...
Illustration outreaching the main results of our study published in PNAS: Juan P. González-Varo, Jörg Albrecht, Juan M. Arroyo, Rafael S. Bueno, Tamara Burgos, Gema Escribano-Ávila, Nina Farwig, Daniel García, Juan C. Illera, Pedro Jordano, Przemysław Kurek, Sascha Rösner, Emilio Virgós & William J. Sutherland (2023) Frugivore-mediated seed dispers...
Illustration outreaching the main results of our study published in PNAS:
Juan P. González-Varo, Jörg Albrecht, Juan M. Arroyo, Rafael S. Bueno, Tamara Burgos, Gema Escribano-Ávila, Nina Farwig, Daniel García, Juan C. Illera, Pedro Jordano, Przemysław Kurek, Sascha Rösner, Emilio Virgós & William J. Sutherland (2023) Frugivore-mediated seed disper...
Seed dispersal by frugivores is a fundamental function for plant community dynamics in fragmented landscapes, where forest remnants are typically embedded in a matrix of anthropogenic habitats. Frugivores can mediate both connectivity among forest remnants and plant colonization of the matrix. However, it remains poorly understood how frugivore com...
Illustration outreaching the main results of our study published in PNAS: Juan P. González-Varo, Jörg Albrecht, Juan M. Arroyo, Rafael S. Bueno, Tamara Burgos, Gema Escribano-Ávila, Nina Farwig, Daniel García, Juan C. Illera, Pedro Jordano, Przemysław Kurek, Sascha Rösner, Emilio Virgós & William J. Sutherland (2023) Frugivore-mediated seed dispers...
1 - The outcomes of plant-animal interactions often transcend the mere encounter stage, as those encounters are followed by a chain of subsequent stages on the plant’s reproductive cycle that ultimately determine fitness. In particular, the dissemination and recruitment stages of animal-mediated seed dispersal are seldom jointly analysed, hindering...
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...
Background and Aims
Despite chromosomal evolution being one of the major drivers of diversification in plants, we do not yet have a clear view of how new chromosome rearrangements become fixed within populations, which is a crucial step forward for understanding chromosomal speciation.
Methods
In this study, we test the role of genetic drift in th...
Plant-animal mutualisms such as seed dispersal are key interactions for sustaining plant range shifts. It remains elusive whether the organization of interactions with seed dispersers is reconfigured along the expansion landscape template and, if so, whether its effects accelerate or slow colonization. Here we analyse plant-frugivore interactions i...
Patterns of resource use observed at the species level emerge from the way individuals exploit the range of available resources. Hence, accounting for interindividual differences in resource use, such as pollinator use by plants, is essential to advance our understanding of community assembly and persistence. By using finely resolved data on plant–...
Mutualistic interactions among free‐living species generally involve low‐frequency interactions and highly asymmetric dependence among partners, yet our understanding of factors behind their emergence is still limited. Using individual‐based interactions of a super‐generalist fleshy‐fruited plant with its frugivore assemblage, we estimated the Reso...
Species interactions can propagate disturbances across space via direct and indirect effects, potentially connecting species at a global scale. However, ecological and biogeographic boundaries may mitigate this spread by demarcating the limits of ecological networks. We tested whether large-scale ecological boundaries (ecoregions and biomes) and hu...
Range expansion in plant populations, especially at the colonization front, can be either limited by disproportionately large effects of antagonistic interactions or facilitated by their release. How the strength of antagonistic interactions changes along successional gradients during range expansion is still poorly documented, especially when dive...
Seed dispersal, by entailing multiple benefits to plants and frugivores, potential drives trait evolution and species diversification. Frugivory and seed dispersal shaped the coevolution of interacting clades, with consequences to speciation and diversification evidenced for e.g., primates. Evidences for macro-coevolutionary patterns in multi-speci...
Mutualistic interactions among free-living species generally involve weak links and highly asymmetric dependence among partners, yet our understanding of factors beyond their emergence is still limited. Using individual-based interactions of a super-generalist fleshy-fruited plant with its frugivore assemblage we estimate the Resource Provisioning...
Aim
Interactor richness in host–parasite networks, corresponding to either parasite species richness for host species or host range for parasite species, can be a function of taxonomic or trait constraints. Species appearing in multiple networks can have similar interactor richness in each network owing to these taxonomic and trait constraints, res...
Disentangling the structure of plant–animal mutualisms shed light on how species are organized, and allow us to infer about resilience, specificity, and ultimately the consequences of the loss of functions to the ecosystem. Here we gathered fruit–frugivore interactions for all the major vertebrate taxa interacting with plants in two conservation st...
Seed dispersal by frugivorous bird species involves a fine temporal tuning between fruiting plants and birds. However, this interaction may be severely threatened by anthropogenic climate and land-use change, which may result in phenological mismatches and pervasive ecological consequences for avian communities. In this study, we evaluate changes a...
Mutualism effectiveness, the contribution of an interacting organism to its partner's fitness, is defined as the number of immediate outcomes of the interactions (quantity component) multiplied by the probability that an immediate outcome results in a new individual (quality component). These components form a two-dimensional effectiveness landscap...
How species interactions change in space and time is a major question in ecology. In tropical forests, plant individuals share mutualistic partners (pollinators or seed dispersers), yet we have little understanding of the factors affecting these individual interaction patterns. We used a seed dispersal individual-based network describing interactio...
Seed dispersal benefits plants and frugivores, and potentially drives co-evolution, with consequences to diversification evidenced for, e.g., primates. Evidence for macro-coevolutionary patterns in multi-specific, plant-animal mutualisms is scarce, and the mechanisms driving them remain unexplored. We tested for phylogenetic congruences in primate-...
• The partition of the ecological niche can enhance the coexistence of predators due to differences in how they exploit three main resources: food, space, and time, the latter being an axis that often remains unexplored.
• We studied niche segregation in a Mediterranean mesocarnivore community composed by Vulpes vulpes, Genetta genetta, Meles meles...
Species interactions can propagate disturbances across space, though ecological and biogeographic boundaries may limit this spread. We tested whether large-scale ecological boundaries (ecoregions and biomes) and human disturbance gradients increase dissimilarity among ecological networks, while accounting for background spatial and elevational effe...
Biodiversity is more than a collection of individual species. It is the combination of biological entities and processes supporting life on Earth: no single species persists without interacting with other species. A full account of biodiversity on Earth needs to document the essential ecological interactions that support Earth’s system through thei...
Species interactions may vary considerably across space as a result of spatial and environmental gradients. With respect to host–parasite interactions, this suggests that host and parasite species may play different functional roles across the different networks they occur in. Using a global occurrence database of helminth parasites, we examine the...
The inability of small-gaped animals to consume very large fruits may limit seed dispersal of the respective plants. This has often been shown for large-fruited plant species that remain poorly dispersed when large-gaped animal species are lost due to anthropogenic pressure. Little is known about whether gape-size limitations similarly influence se...
Climate change is forcing the redistribution of life on Earth at an unprecedented velocity1,2. Migratory birds are thought to help plants to track climate change through long-distance seed dispersal3,4. However, seeds may be consistently dispersed towards cooler or warmer latitudes depending on whether the fruiting period of a plant species coincid...
Recording species interactions is one of the main challenges in ecological studies. Frugivory has received much attention for decades as a model for mutualisms among free‐living species, and a variety of methods have been designed and developed for sampling and monitoring plant–frugivore interactions. The diversity of techniques poses an important...
In this remembrance, we have brought together some of Victor Rico‐Gray’s friends and collaborators to recall his many contributions to tropical ecology and his influence on so many young scientists. Victor’s research ranged from Mexican ethnobotany to the evolutionary ecology of complex interactions between ants and plants. His research was highly...
The biotic and abiotic context of individual plants within animal‐pollinated plant populations can influence pollinator foraging behaviour. Pollinator movements regulate pollen flow among plant individuals, and ultimately determine individual plant reproductive success. Yet the underlying drivers of this context dependency of interactions at the po...
The scaling relationship observed between species richness and the geographical area sampled (i.e. the species-area relationship (SAR)) is a widely recognized macroecological relationship. Recently, this theory has been extended to trophic interactions, suggesting that geographical area may influence the structure of species interaction networks (i...
The world‐wide decline in populations of large‐bodied vertebrates due to deforestation and poaching threatens the persistence of animal‐dispersed plants by reducing long‐distance seed dispersal and generating aggregated seed rain patterns.
We evaluated whether the composition of maternal trees contributing to the seed rain is also impacted by the l...
The partition of the ecological niche can enhance the coexistence of predators due to
differences in how they exploit three main resources: food, space, and time, the latter being an axis that remains often unexplored. We studied niche segregation in a Mediterranean mesocarnivore community in sites where the top predator, the Iberian lynx, is abse...
Under current global change context, climate change is driving substantial phenological mismatches between plant species and the organisms that rely on them. Given that frugivorous birds are fundamental for forest regeneration, and most of them are migrant species, identifying the effect of global change over them must be a priority. In this study...
Large mammalian herbivores play an important role in shaping the diversity of tropical forests by affecting the survival of seedlings and saplings beneath parent plants. The white‐lipped peccary ( Tayassu pecari ) accounts for the largest herbivore biomass that controls seed and seedling survival in Neotropical ecosystems. However, hunting and habi...
Ecological interactions shape the evolution of multiple species traits in populations. These traits are often linked to each other through genetic correlations, affecting how each trait evolves through selection imposed by interacting partners. Here, we integrate quantitative genetics, coevolutionary theory and network science to explore how trait...
Mutualistic interactions between frugivorous birds and fleshy‐fruited plants are key processes for both natural plant regeneration and the maintenance of birds relying on fruit resources. However, seed dispersal effectiveness (SDE) has been frequently studied only from the plant's perspective, that is the contribution of animals to plant fitness.
U...
The biotic and abiotic context of individual plants in animal-pollinated plant populations may influence pollinator foraging behaviour and therefore how the pollen flow occurs. Thus, this variation among conspecifics within a given plant population can ultimately influence the plant reproductive success. Here we used a fine-scale, well characterize...
Concern for megafauna is increasing among scientists and non-scientists. Many studies have emphasized that megafauna play prominent ecological roles and provide important ecosystem services to humanity. But, what precisely are ‘megafauna’? Here, we critically assess the concept of megafauna and propose a goal-oriented framework for megafaunal resea...
Diaspore (e.g. seeds, fruits) dispersal is pivotal for plant communities and often involves several steps and different dispersing agents. Most studies focusing on diaspore dispersal by animals have highlighted the role of vertebrates, neglecting the role of ants in the diaspore dispersal of non‐myrmecochorous plants. Diaspore dispersal by ants is...
Seed dispersal interactions involve key ecological processes in tropical forests that help to maintain ecosystem functioning. Yet this functionality may be threatened by increasing habitat loss, defaunation, and fragmentation. However, generalist species, and their interactions, can benefit from the habitat change caused by human disturbance while...
The nature and the strength of plant‐frugivore interactions often vary along an antagonism–mutualism continuum and are highly influenced by the local ecological context (e.g. level of environmental disturbances). However, little is known concerning how the local ecological setting where plant–frugivore interactions take place affects the seed dispe...
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...
Seed dispersal interactions involve key ecological processes in tropical forests that help to maintain ecosystem functioning. Yet this functionality may be threatened by increasing habitat loss, defaunation and fragmentation. However, generalist species, and their interactions, can benefit from the habitat change caused by human disturbance while m...
Juvenile animals generally disperse from their birthplace to their future breeding territories. In fragmented landscapes, habitat-specialist species must disperse through the anthropogenic matrix where remnant habitats are embedded. Here, we test the hypothesis that dispersing juvenile frugivores leave a footprint in the form of seed deposition thr...
http://www.newphytologist.org/img/upload/files/43rd%20NPS%20Abstract%20Book.pdf
Species on Earth are interconnected with each other through ecological interactions. Defaunation can erode those connections, yet we lack evolutionary predictions about the consequences of losing interactions in human-modified ecosystems. We quantified the fate of the evolutionary history of avian–seed dispersal interactions across tropical forest...
Context
Landscape structure can affect seed dispersal, but the spatial scale at which such effect is maximized (scale of effect, SoE) is unknown.
Objectives
We assessed patterns and predictors of SoE on the seed rain in two Mexican regions: the relatively well-preserved Lacandona rainforest, and the more deforested Los Tuxtlas rainforest. We hypot...
Despite great interest in metrics to quantify the structure of ecological networks, the effects of sampling and scale remain poorly understood. In fact, one of the most challenging issues in ecology is how to define suitable scales (i.e., temporal or spatial) to accurately describe and understand ecological systems.
Here, we sampled a series of ant...
The honeybee is the primary managed species worldwide for both crop pollination and honey production. Owing to beekeeping activity, its high relative abundance potentially affects the structure and functioning of pollination networks in natural ecosystems. Given that evidences about beekeeping impacts are restricted to observational studies of spec...
The seed dispersal effectiveness framework allows assessing mutualistic services from frugivorous animals in terms of quantity and quality. Quantity accounts for the number of seeds dispersed and quality for the probability of recruitment of dispersed seeds. Research on this topic has largely focused on the spatial patterns of seed deposition becau...
A framework for the description and analysis of multilayer networks is established in statistical physics, and calls are increasing for their adoption by community ecologists. Multilayer networks in community ecology will allow space, time and multiple interaction types to be incorporated into species interaction networks.
While the multilayer netw...
Synzoochory is the dispersal of seeds by seed‐caching animals. The animal partner in this interaction plays a dual role, acting both as seed disperser and seed predator. We propose that this duality gives to synzoochory two distinctive features that have crucial ecological and evolutionary consequences. First, because plants attract animals that ha...
Aim
Fruit colours attract animal seed dispersers, yet the causes of fruit colour diversity remain controversial. The lack of knowledge of large‐scale spatial patterns in fruit colours has limited our ability to formulate and test alternative hypotheses to explain fruit colour, fruit size and fruit colour diversity. We describe spatial (especially l...
There is growing interest in understanding the functional outcomes of species interactions in ecological networks. For many mutualistic networks, including pollination and seed dispersal networks, interactions are generally sampled by recording animal foraging visits to plants. However, these visits may not reflect actual pollination or seed disper...
1. There is growing interest in understanding the functional outcomes of species interactions in ecological networks. For many mutualistic networks, including pollination and se