Rosa M Canals

Rosa M Canals
Public University of Navarre | UPNA · Natural Environment Sciences

PhD
Professor in Grassland Ecology and Restauration

About

60
Publications
10,734
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815
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Introduction

Publications

Publications (60)
Article
Full-text available
Soils store an important amount of carbon (C), mostly in the form of organic matter in different decomposing stages. Hence, understanding the factors that rule the rates at which decomposed organic matter is incorporated into the soil is paramount to better understand how C stocks will vary under changing atmospheric and land use conditions. We stu...
Article
Full-text available
Soil is the largest terrestrial carbon pool, making it crucial for climate change mitigation. Soil organic carbon (SOC) is suggested to depend on biodiversity components, but much evidence comes from diversity-function experiments. To disentangle the relationships of plant guild diversity with SOC storage (kg m ⁻² ) at broad spatial scales, we appl...
Article
Full-text available
Fungal endophytes develop inside plants without visible external signs, and they may confer adaptive advantages to their hosts. Culturing methods have been traditionally used to recognize the fungal endophytic assemblage, but novel metabarcoding techniques are being increasingly applied. This study aims to characterize the fungal endophytic assembl...
Article
Plant-soil feedback mechanisms influence the abundance and rarity of plant species and can favour invasive processes, including those of native species. To explore these mechanisms, we analysed correlations between spatial distributions of plant biomass and soil properties in two neighbouring grasslands at different phases of expansion of the nativ...
Article
Full-text available
The plant microbiome is likely to play a key role in the resilience of communities to the global climate change. This research analyses the culturable fungal mycobiota of Brachypodium rupestre across a sharp gradient of disturbance caused by an intense, anthropogenic fire regime. This factor has dramatic consequences for the community composition a...
Article
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Over millennia, the combination of controlled burnings and extensive grazing has maintained mosaic landscapes and preserved mountain grasslands in southern Europe. In the last century, deep socio-economic changes have led to an abandonment of traditional uses, to a general decline of the domestic herbivory and to a misuse of burning practices. This...
Article
Full-text available
Grasslands are one of the major sinks of terrestrial soil organic carbon (SOC). Understanding how environmental and management factors drive SOC is challenging because they are scale-dependent, with large-scale drivers affecting SOC both directly and through drivers working at small scales. Here we addressed how regional, landscape and grazing mana...
Article
Mountain ecosystems face many challenges related to global change. Most high-altitude grasslands in the Pyre-nees, despite representing valuable assets recognised in the European conservation heritage, are at risk due to the decline of traditional extensive ranging. This research intends to quantify economically the loss of the provision-ing servic...
Article
Full-text available
Global change modifies vegetation composition in grasslands with shifts in plant functional types (PFT). Although changes in plant community composition imply changes in soil function, this relationship is not well understood. We investigated the relative importance of environmental (climatic, management and soil) variables and plant functional div...
Presentation
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Link to the Shiny app: https://antonio-rodrguez.shinyapps.io/Soil_organic_carbon_Pyrenees/ Grasslands are one of the major sinks of terrestrial soil organic carbon (SOC). Understanding how environmental and management factors drive SOC is challenging because there are scale-dependent effects, and large scale drivers affecting SOC both directly and...
Preprint
Full-text available
Abstract. Grasslands are one of the major sinks of terrestrial soil organic carbon (SOC). Understanding how environmental and management factors drive SOC is challenging because they are scale-dependent, with large scale drivers affecting SOC both directly and through drivers working at detailed spatial scales. Here we addressed how regional, lands...
Article
Full-text available
Background and Aims In highland ecosystems, global change processes are intense and foster vegetation shifts that may have an impact on soil functioning. Soil bacterial communities may be particularly sensitive to these changing scenarios. The aim of this research is to determine whether the loss of floristic diversity caused by the unusual dominan...
Article
Full-text available
The history of the planet is an ever-changing story. Nowadays, managers of the natural environment face the challenge of dealing with a dynamic landscape that is at a turning point due to the global change (climate and land use change) brought about by human actions in recent centuries. This article discusses the traditional concept of conservation...
Article
Rural depopulation, abandonment of traditional land uses and decrease of extensive stockfarming is accelerating shrub encroachment in mountain areas. In NW Spain, gorse (Ulex gallii Planch.) is expanding, developing dense shrublands that accumulate high fuel-loads, ignite easily and persist during long periods as alternate stable states. Under this...
Article
Full-text available
Background and aims Perennial tall-grasses have experienced a successful expansion in the last decades leading in some cases to extremely degraded communities, which remain in an alternate stable state. This research focuses on the mechanisms of persistence of the spreading native Brachypodium pinnatum in acidic soils. We hypothesize that plant-her...
Article
In Europe, rural depopulation and the abandonment of pastoral practices in mountain areas trigger deep changes in the landscape, which result in the accumulation of lignified fuels and the increased risk of fires, a sensitive issue in southern areas of the continent. From prehistory, a pyric herbivory has been practiced in European mountain regions...
Article
Full-text available
In the southern Pyrenees, human population and therefore land uses have changed from forests to pastures, then crops, and back to pastures and secondary forests during the last two centuries. To understand what such rapid land use changes have meant for carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) stocks, we used data from two forest sites in the western Pyrenees,...
Article
Biscogniauxia nummularia is known for its association with beech (Fagus sylvatica), on which it occurs as a saprotroph and a pathogen causing strip cankers following water stress. This fungus has also been reported as a dominant endophytic species in plants of the sedge Carex brevicollis growing in the understory of beech forests and adjacent grass...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
European mountain areas have historically gone through substantial changes in land use. In the southern Pyrenees, by mid-19th century the industrial and agricultural revolutions arrived, allowing clearing more forests and planting new crops. Human population levels peaked by the late 19th century, forcing to expand cereal crops (and potato in the m...
Article
Full-text available
The sedge Carex brevicollis is a common component of semi-natural grasslands and forests in temperate mountains of Central and Southern Europe. The consumption of this species causes a severe toxicity to livestock, associated to high plant concentrations of the beta-carbolic alkaloid brevicolline. This research was started to ascertain the origin o...
Article
QuestionDo prescribed winter fires – authorized to prevent shrub encroachment and control necromass accumulation in protected grassland communities – promote significant changes in soils and in the pool of nutrients available to plants? Does Brachypodium pinnatum, an expanding native grass, take better advantage of the most dynamic nutrient pulse,...
Article
In sustainable agriculture, returns of organic materials to soil have a major impact on carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) turnover, but their effect on the final availability of N to crops is difficult to quantify, and the nature of the C source is usually neglected in predictive models. We investigated the individual and combined effects of labile sugar...
Article
Natural plant populations have a long history of coevolution with fungal endophytes. Hence, it is plausible that the agronomic conversion of a natural grass population hosting a fungus initiates a change in their symbiotic relationship. Current data comparing the frequencies of fungal infection in commercial cultivars of some agronomic grasses indi...
Article
Full-text available
Resource competition and chemical interference are mechanisms of interaction among plants that may occur simultaneously. However, both mechanisms are rarely considered together when modelling plant growth. We propose a new empirical model that estimates biologically significant parameters on both plant competition and chemical interference. The mod...
Conference Paper
One of the key issues in climate change research is the assessment of the effect of land use on C storage and the role of management on the C cycle. Recent studies suggest that grasslands could be a sink for C, but information is scarce on the impact that grassland management could have on this sink. In order to address these questions, a regional...
Article
Full-text available
Disturbances by fossorial mammals are extremely common in many ecosystems, including the California annual grassland. We compared the impact of juveniles of four common plant colonizers (Aegilops triuncialis, Cerastium glomeratum, Aphanes occidentalis and Lupinus bicolor) on the pools and fluxes of N in mounds created by pocket gophers (Thomomys bo...
Article
Autotoxicity is the chemical influence of one plant on the development of individuals of the same species. Autotoxicity in perennial plants can be a useful mechanism to avoid future conspecific competitors, however, the ecological role of autotoxicity in annuals, if any, remains uncertain. In this paper, we analyse the autotoxic phenomenon in Loliu...
Article
In Mediterranean areas, the establishment of multi-species pastures for extensive livestock use is an alternative to the growing of traditional cereal crops. Lolium rigidum Gaud. is one of the most valuable forage grasses adapted to semiarid environments but its performance in mixtures is not fully understood. Field observations suggest that the sp...
Article
Nitrogen limitation of many temperate plant communities makes the impacts of fossorial mammal activity on soil N dynamics an interesting and potentially important topic. We determined the effects of gopher mound building on soil N transformations by measuring gross rates of N mineralization and nitrification using short-term 15N pool dilution metho...
Article
It is well accepted that intense anthropogenic activities threaten European heathland communities. The negative impact of high intensities of livestock grazing on heath survival has been demonstrated in many studies, however, it does not seem a straightforward consequence in some cases: in the southern Pyrenees, the existence of large heathland pat...
Article
Full-text available
The preservation of the floristic diversity of natural ecosystems and the maintenance of extensive livestock grazing are two of the major priorities of European Union agricultural and environmental policies. Temperate natural and seminatural grasslands are among the most threatened ecosystems in Europe. In order to establish the most appropriate ma...
Article
The hypothesis that mole burrowing activity alters soil nutrient fluxes and that, as a response to the new conditions, a specialized guild of species develops on the molehills, was tested in an area located in the southwestern Spanish Pyrenees, on a spectrum of montane grassland communities that varies from xeric to temporally waterlogged. Evidence...
Article
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Directiva Europea (92/43/CEE): los pastos subalpinos calcícolas y los claros de hayedos desarrollados sobre sustrato calizo. En la Sierra de Urbasa y Andía (NO de Navarra) estos hábitats, junto con otras comunidades vegetales, son pas-tados por unas 11 750 UGM de ganado extensivo, primordialmente ovino, vacuno y equino. Los ganaderos de la zona han...
Article
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7 págs, 1 figura, 3 tablas.-- Comunicación presentada a la XLV Reunión Científica de la Sociedad Española para el Estudio de los Pastos: "Producciones agroganaderas: gestión eficiente y conservación del medio natural" (Gijón, 28 de mayo al 3 de junio de 2005). [ES] La síntesis de micotoxinas por hongos endófitos puede ejercer funciones ecológicas i...

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