Susana Bautista

• University of Alicante

Stepping up ecosystem restoration is critical to achieving pressing policy targets, but as well as significant benefits, there are also multiple challenges particularly associated with restoring at landscape scale. These relate to the complexity of ecosystems, land uses, and social factors within a landscape and the scale at which sustainable fundi...

Climate change is expected to lead to a drier world, with more frequent and severe droughts, constituting a growing threat to biodiversity, especially in drylands. Positive plant−plant interactions, such as nurse plants facilitating beneficiary communities in their understorey, could mitigate such climate-induced stress. However, testing the real-w...

Increasing wildfire frequency in the Mediterranean Basin could affect future plant-soil–water-dynamics. The capacity of soils to retain water is a key parameter affecting plant post-fire regeneration. Yet, few research has looked at how different soil properties related to water retention is affected by increasing wildfire frequency. This study aim...

The development of silvicultural practices that seek to promote structural heterogeneity is increasingly demanded. This work investigates the effect of thinning spatial pattern on the response to pre-commercial thinning of dense Aleppo pine post-fire stands. On three replicated experimental sites in SE Spain, we applied the following treatments: 60...

Understanding the factors that control grass-shrub interactions and coexistence is critical to the design of dryland management and restoration strategies. Using Stipa tenacissima tussocks as adult neighbor and Olea europaea var. sylvestris as target woody species, we performed a 5-year-long, large-scale manipulative experiment to investigate the i...

5-years dataset from a large-scale study conducted in semi-arid steppes that assessed the performance (growth and survival) of Olea europaea shrubs outplanted in the vicinity of Stipa tenacissima tussocks and on bare-soil inter-tussock areas, also including data on soil water content in the planting holes.

Recurrent fires can impede the spontaneous recruitment capacity of pine forests. Empirical studies have suggested that this can lead to a prolonged replacement of pine forest by shrubland, especially if shrub species are pyrophytic. Model-based studies, however, have suggested that post-fire succession of pine forest under current climatic conditio...

La conectividad se define como el grado en que la estructura espacial del paisaje facilita el flujo de organismos y substancias. Diversos modelos conceptuales y evidencias empíricas atribuyen a la conectividad hidrológica un papel clave en el funcionamiento de los ecosistemas y paisajes áridos, pero aún falta una perspectiva integrada sobre los dis...

There is strong empirical evidence on the importance of the spatial pattern of vegetation in dryland hydrologic and geomorphologic dynamics. However, changes in vegetation cover and spatial pattern are often linked, making it difficult to disentangle and assess their independent hydro-geomorphologic roles. We used synthetic sponges placed on the so...

PurposeIncreasing wildfire frequency in Mediterranean-basin together with drought periods expansion could affect plant-soil-water dynamics processes. The goal is to assess the effects of wildfire frequency on plant recovery, soil properties, soil moisture content (SMC; %) and effective soil water content (ESWC; %) during the first hydrological year...

One of the most challenging issues in Mediterranean ecosystems to date has been to understand the emergence of discontinuous changes or catastrophic shifts. In the era of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, which encompass ideas around Land Degradation Neutrality, advancing this understanding has become even more critical and urgent. The aim of...

The ecological functioning of dryland ecosystems is closely related to the spatial pattern of the vegetation, which is typically structured in patches. Ground arthropods mediate key soil functions and ecological processes, yet little is known about the influence of dryland vegetation pattern on their abundance and diversity. Here, we investigate ho...

Recent observations suggest that repeated fires could drive Mediterranean forests to shrublands, hosting flammable vegetation that regrows quickly after fire. This feedback supposedly favours shrubland persistence and may be strengthened in the future by predicted increased aridity. An assessment was made of how fires and aridity in combination mod...

Identified as essential mechanisms promoting alternative stable states, positive feedbacks have been the focus of most former studies on the potential for catastrophic shifts in drylands. Conversely, little is known about how negative feedbacks could counterbalance the effects of positive feedbacks. A decrease in vegetation cover increases the conn...

The Brazilian savanna (Cerrado) has been extensively converted to croplands, pastures and forestry plantations, and the deforestation frontier continues expanding. Land conversion may cause critical changes in soil functioning, yet very little is still known about the impact of Cerrado conversion on nutrient cycling and soil fertility. Here, we add...

Positive interspecific plant–plant interactions in (semi-)arid ecosystems are crucial for supporting ecosystem diversity and stability, but how interactions respond to grazing combined with temporal variation in drought is poorly understood. In a semi-arid area in south-eastern Spain (Murcia region), we planted 1280 saplings of the palatable shrub...

Competition is a major factor structuring plant communities and controlling their productivity. The functional similarity between the interacting species and the context resource availability are assumed to be most critical factors that modulate the strength, sign, and outcome of plant competition, yet their roles and interactions are subjected to...

Conversion of native vegetation to agriculture may change the carbon cycle by reducing carbon soil storage capacity and increasing CO2 emissions. We aimed to comparatively assess the impact of land use change on labile pools and dynamics of soil organic carbon (SOC) in two land uses (Urochloa pastures and Eucalyptus forestry) relative to the native...

Land Surface Phenology (LSP) metrics are increasingly being used as indicators of climate change impacts in ecosystems. For this purpose, it is necessary to use methods that can be applied to large areas with different types of vegetation, including vulnerable semiarid ecosystems that exhibit high spatial variability and low signal-to-noise ratio i...

In Mediterranean forests and rangelands, the supply of important ecosystem services can decrease or cease as a consequence of disturbances and climatic oscillations. Land managers can sometimes prevent or mitigate the negative effects of disturbances through appropriate land management choices. In this study, we assess the contribution of land mana...

Recent research has identified the connectivity of the bare-soil interpatch areas as a key pattern attribute that controls resource conservation and structure-function feedbacks in dryland ecosystems, and several indices have been developed for this attribute. We aimed to characterize the dependence of bare-soil connectivity on vegetation cover and...

Drylands cover about 31% of the European landmass, and are the home of around 25% of its population, thereby making the lives of a substantial part of the European population directly or indirectly dependent on the wellbeing of these drylands. Research done by the European Environmental Agency (EEA), shows that especially the area around the Medite...

We evaluated the potential of an outranking Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis approach for assisting in the participatory assessment of dryland management actions implemented in the San Simon watershed, in southeastern Arizona, USA. We compared an outranking-facilitated assessment of actions with a simple and direct (baseline) ranking of the same ac...

In drylands, the underlying vegetation structure is associated with ecosystem functioning and ecosystem resilience. Although scale-dependent patterns are also predicted, empirical evidence often demonstrates that patch sizes are distributed according to a power-law probability distribution function or truncated power-law probability distribution fu...

The adoption of sustainable land management strategies and practices that respond to current climate and human pressures requires both assessment tools that can lead to better informed decision-making and effective knowledge-exchange mechanisms that facilitate new learning and behavior change. We propose a learning-centered participatory approach t...

Las Comisiones de Grado de los Centros Universitarios tienen una labor muy importante en la puesta en marcha y seguimiento de muchas de las actividades docentes en los Grados Universitarios. Este es el caso de la Comisión de Grado de la Titulación en Biología de la Facultad de Ciencias de la Universidad de Alicante, que ha realizado, en este último...

We conducted a community-scale manipulative experiment to analyze the role of cover, pattern, and functional type of extant vegetation in controlling the establishment of colonizing spontaneaous species in dryland communities.

Both positive and negative plant­plant interactions control the structure, diversity and dynamics of plant communities. The sign and intensity of these interactions are expected to respond to a variety of biotic and abiotic factors. However, here is still a large degree of uncertainty regarding the most relevant control factors, and very few insigh...

Although the importance of monitoring and evaluation of restoration actions is increasingly acknowledged, availability of accurate, quantitative monitoring data is very rare for most restoration areas, particularly for long-established restoration projects. We propose using fuzzy rule-based expert systems to evaluate the degree of success of restor...

Fire-prone Mediterranean shrublands may be seriously threatened by land degradation due to progressive opening of the vegetation cover driven by increasing drought and fire recurrence. However, information about the consequences of this opening process for critical ecosystem functions is scant. In this work, we studied the influence of vegetation a...

Un equipo multidisciplinar de profesores y profesoras que imparten docencia en la asignatura Iniciación a la Investigación en Biología, constituyen la Red Docente INVES con el fin de desarrollar una metodología propia de trabajo en equipo, en coordinación con el profesorado de la asignatura Estadística, con la que se comparten objetivos de aprendiz...

Implantación de los nuevos Grados, como sustitución de las Licenciaturas en los estudios universitarios, lleva consigo un proceso de Reacreditación, consistente en la revisión de una serie de parámetros de calidad, a realizar una vez terminada su implantación. Este proceso se ha desarrollado en tres ámbitos principales: la Gestión del Título, los R...

RESUMEN Una vez implantado el Grado de Biología, es el momento de hacer una revisión profunda de los resultados obtenidos, con el fin de comprobar si éstos son adecuados para garantizar la continuidad de la impartición del mismo. Esta comunicación se presenta como resultado del trabajo que se está realizando en el seno de la Comisión del Grado en B...

Con el curso académico 2013-2014 finaliza la implantación de los títulos de Grado en la Universidad de Alicante, y con ello se abre un período de análisis de este proceso que será la antesala de la evaluación y la acreditación de títulos. Los actuales títulos de Grado se diseñaron en un escenario socio-cultural-económico muy diferente al que se ha...

Several management actions are applied to restore ecosystem services in degraded Mediterranean rangelands, which range from adjusting the grazing pressure to the removal of grazers and pine plantations. Four such actions were assessed in Quercus coccifera L. shrublands in northern Greece: (1) moderate grazing by goats and sheep, (2) no grazing, (3)...

Soil enzymes are critical to soil nutrient cycling function but knowledge on the factors that control their response to major disturbances such as wildfires remains very limited. We evaluated the effect of fire-related plant functional traits (resprouting and seeding) on the resistance and resilience to fire of two soil enzyme activities involved i...

Feedbacks between vegetation spatial pattern and resource redistribution from bare areas (sources) to vegetation patches (sinks) are considered critical to the functioning of dryland ecosystems. However, experimental fieldworks testing the underlying assumptions and quantifying the feedbacks involved are very scarce. We hypothesized that the size a...

El objetivo general del proyecto PRACTICE consistió en vincular los avances científicos y tecnológicos con el conocimiento tradicional, el aprendizaje y la gestión adaptativa en las prácticas de restauración para combatir la desertificación. El proyecto desarrolló una serie de metodologías para la evaluación de alternativas de gestión incorporando...

This study analyses the effect of successional stage after farmland terrace abandonment on post-fire plant recovery in a Mediterranean landscape. Specific objectives of the study were to (1) compare fuel characteristics and fire severity in three successional stages after farmland abandonment – dry grassland, dense shrubland and pine stands; (2) an...

The phenological characteristics of the vegetation are key elements for understanding vegetation responses in different climate change scenarios, as well as indicators of ongoing processes of increasing aridity. Determination of phenological parameters for different types of vegetation in large areas help evaluate current and future impacts of clim...

Moderate resolution remote sensing data, as provided by MODIS, can be used to detect and map active or past wildfires from daily records of suitable combinations of reflectance bands. The objective of the present work was to develop and test simple algorithms and variations for automatic or semiautomatic detection of burnt areas from time series da...

Reforestation projects in semiarid lands often yield poor results. Water scarcity, poor soil fertility, and structure strongly limit the survival and growth of planted seedlings in these areas. At two experimental semiarid sites, we evaluated a variety of low-cost planting techniques in order to increase water availability to plants. Treatments inc...

Some invasive grasses have been reported to change fire behavior in invaded plant communities. Urochloa brizantha is an aggressive invasive grass in the Brazilian Cerrado, an ecosystem where fire is a common disturbance. We investigated the effects of U. brizantha on fire behavior in an open Cerrado physiognomy in Central Brazil. Using experimental...

Tras el trabajo previo de diseño de la asignatura Iniciación a la Investigación en Biología, el equipo multidisciplinar de profesores y profesoras de la Red Docente INVES ha desarrollado una metodología propia de trabajo en equipo, no sólo entre el diferente profesorado que la compone, sino también con el profesorado de la asignatura Estadística, c...

Durante el curso académico 2013-2014 ha tenido lugar la implantación del último curso del Grado en Biología. Esto permite hacer un análisis completo de la implantación del título, así como un estudio sobre el diseño y desarrollo del Trabajo de fin de Grado y la adaptación del Programa de Prácticas externas. Estrategias de trabajo a través de las co...

In this study, we seeded a native plant species and applied a mulch of chopped wood originating from the same burned area to avoid the establishment of invasive species. We evaluated four treatments: (1) seeding, (2) mulch, (3) seeding and mulch, and (4) control. Our objective was to increase plant recovery and to minimize the soil erosion and degr...

Plant-plant interactions in semiarid steppes as a function of the interaction between nutrients and water availability Luna Morcillo, Susana Bautista. Department of Ecology. University of Alicante, Spain. The outcome of plant-plant interactions in semiarid ecosystems may depend on specific and functional traits of the species involved and on the...

Dryland degradation and the related loss of ecosystem services is a major threat to biodiversity and livelihoods of local land users. Coupled effects of increasing anthropogenic pressures, unsustainable land management and climate change alter ecosystem resilience and may result in profound shifts of socio-ecological environments. It is due to thes...

Burnt areas as a result of wildfires can be readily detected from high resolution aerial photographs or satellite imagery of the zone that includes the wildfire. Moderate resolution remote sensing data, as provided by MODIS, can also be used to detect active or past wildfires, most usually from daily records of a suitable combination of reflectance...

Conceptual frameworks of dryland degradation commonly include ecohydrological feedbacks between landscape spatial organization and resource loss, so that decreasing cover and size of vegetation patches result in higher water and soil losses, which lead to further vegetation loss. However, the impacts of these feedbacks on dryland dynamics in respon...

Conceptual frameworks of dryland degradation commonly include ecohydrological feedbacks between landscape spatial organization and resource loss, so that decreasing cover and size of vegetation patches result in higher water and soil losses, which lead to further vegetation loss. However, the impacts of these feedbacks on dryland dynamics in respon...

Resumen La reforestación es uno de los métodos más ampliamente utilizados para la recuperación de los ecosistemas degradados. En ambientes mediterráneos, las limitaciones impuestas por el clima y, en algunos casos, la severidad de los procesos de degradación hacen que los resultados de las reforestaciones sean pobres. Por otro lado, el seguimiento...

Policy and management approaches and strategies to address desertification can be broadly grouped as prevention and reversal. Desertification is framed within multi-scale, coupled human-environmental dynamics, and so must be the approaches for prevention and reversal. The development of integrated and participatory methods for evaluating and monito...

Ecosystem monitoring and assessment are often based on functional indicators, which provide integrated and yet simple and affordable measures of key ecosystem functions. The landscape function analysis (LFA) assesses ecosystem functioning through three indices that represent basic soil functions: surface stability, infiltration, and nutrient cyclin...

Prevention and restoration actions to combat desertification: an integrated assessment (PRACTICE) is a support action of the European Commission Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development, which is being developed during three years since September 2009. It gathers scientists and stakeholders from several desertification...

In occidental Europe, Spain is one of countries the most severely affected by desertification (Arnalds & Arsher 2000). Particularly, South-eastern Spain is considered as one of the most threatened areas by desertification in Mediterranean Europe (Vallejo 1997). In 2003, the Valencia Regional Forest Service implemented a restoration demonstration pr...

Wildfires may produce ecosystem damages that would require post-fire mitigation and/or restoration actions. The question is what are the criteria to identify those burned areas that show high degradation risk in order to plan and prioritise restoration projects. To address that question it is necessary to start with the analysis of fire impact, and...

Plant-plant interactions in semiarid steppes as a function of resource availability Luna Morcillo1, Diana Turrión1, Susana Bautista1. 1University of Alicante, Spain. The outcome of plant-plant interactions in semiarid ecosystems depends on the specific traits of species involved and on the biotic and abiotic conditions prevailing in the area. Yet,...

Runoff and sediment yields in semiarid areas have often been reported to be scale-dependent. However, scale relationships in these areas have been poorly quantified using empirical data. Commonly, previous empirical works on scale issues have focused on the effect of the size of the contributing area for a particular scale (e.g. catchments of diffe...

Biological soil crusts (BSC) play a major role in water and nutrient fluxes in semi-arid and arid areas, affecting the establishment of vascular plants and contributing to the spatial arrangement of vegetated and open areas. However, little is known regarding their effects on the performance of extant vegetation. By using experimental manipulations...

Drylands in the northern Mediterranean present significant challenges for efforts to preserve ecosystem services. Warming trends combined with declining and more variable summer precipitation have come with more frequent and more intense droughts, exacerbating water shortages. Depopulation from rural uplands towards urban coastal regions, with farm...

Electronic Supplementary Material

Due to the challenges faced by resource managers in maintaining post-fire ecosystem health, there is a need for methods to assess the ecological consequences of disturbances. This research examines an approach for assessing changes in post-fire vegetation dynamics for sites in Spain, Israel and the USA that burned in 1998, 1999 and 2002 respectivel...

Recent advances in desertification and land degradation research have provided valuable conceptual and analytical frameworks, degradation indicators, assessment tools and surveillance systems with respect to desertification drivers, processes, and impacts. These findings, together with stakeholders’ perceptions and local/regional knowledge, have he...

In semiarid ecosystems, the transfer of water, sediments, and nutrients from bare to vegetated areas is known to be crucial to ecosystem functioning. Rainfall simulation experiments were performed on bare-soil and vegetated surfaces, on both wet and dry soils, in semiarid shrub-steppe landscapes of SE Spain to investigate the spatial and temporal f...

Background/Question/Methods The use of methods based on process indicators to monitor and evaluate ecosystem functioning is of scientific and applied interest due to their relatively low-cost and rapid ease of acquisition in comparison to detailed direct quantitative measures of ecosystem processes and fluxes. However, the technical potential of t...

Wildfire is a natural phenomenon that began with the development of terrestrial vegetation in a lightning-filled atmosphere 350 million years ago. As human populations developed in the Pleistocene and Holocene epochs, mankind transformed fire into one of its oldest tools. A negative impact of prime concern in the 21st Century is desertification. Th...

Wildfire is a natural phenomenon that began with the development of terrestrial vegetation in a lightning-filled atmosphere. Sediments from the Carboniferous Period (307-359 million years before the present) contain evidence of charcoal from post-fire ash slurry flows. As human populations developed in the Pleistocene and Holocene epochs, mankind t...

Ecological restoration represents an important tool for combating land degradation and increasing ecosystem resistance and resilience to disturbance, thus favoring the recovery of functions and services. Degraded drylands constitute very harsh conditions for the natural regeneration and rangeland restoration of the ecosystems. Scarcity of rainfall...

Mulch is a cover placed over the soil to modify energy and water fluxes and to protect the soil in target areas. In agriculture and gardening, the main purposes of mulching are to modulate the soil temperature, control weed germination by reducing sunlight on the soil surface, preserve soil moisture, and control erosion. In post-fire rehabilitation...

Durante las últimas dos décadas, el grupo de investigación forestal de la Fundación CEAM y del departamento de Ecología de la Universidad de Alicante han estudiado las condiciones que afectan al comportamiento hidrológico y la erosión postincendio en los suelos forestales mediterráneos. El presente trabajo muestra las aportaciones más relevantes de...

The connectivity of runoff sources is considered one of the main factors controlling the hydrology of sparsely vegetated landscapes. However, the empirical demonstration of this role is very limited, partly because of the scarcity of suitable connectivity metrics. In this work, we derived and tested a spatial metric, Flowlength, for quantifying the...

El proyecto de demostración de Albatera se ha implementado en una pequeña cuencade 25 ha localizada en la vertiente sur de la Sierra de Crevillente-Albatera, al sur de la provincia de Alicante. La zona muestra un alto grado de degradación, consecuencia de las condiciones climáticas y edáficas limitantes, y de la acción antrópica. El proyecto de dem...

We studied medium-term dynamics of fire effects on catchment runoff and sediment yield in a dry-Mediterranean area in Alicante, E Spain. The study area was a mixed forest and agricultural terraced landscape that was affected by a wildfire in August 1998. We measured runoff and sediment yield in two catchments – burned and unburned – during the firs...

The importance of the spatial pattern of vegetation for hydrological behavior in semiarid environments is widely acknowledged. However, there is little empirical work testing the hypothetical covariation between vegetation spatial structure and hillslope water and sediment fluxes. We evaluated the relationships between vegetation structural attribu...

Latin America (including Mexico and Central and South America) hosts a substantial proportion of global biodiversity, but suffers from increasing rates of deforestation, land degradation, and dryland expansion. Low-cost modification of local management practices integrating ecological restoration could play a major role in abating ecosystem degrada...

Recent studies have shown that the tussock grass Stipa tenacissima L. facilitates the establishment of late-successional shrubs, in what constitutes the first documented case of facilitation of woody plants by grasses. With the aim of increasing our knowledge of this interaction, in the present study we investigated the effects of S. tenacissima on...

Recent studies have shown that the tussock grass Stipa tenacissima L. facilitates the establishment of late-successional shrubs, in what constitutes the first documented case of facilitation of woody plants by grasses. With the aim of increasing our knowledge of this interaction, in the present study we investigated the effects of S. tenacissima on...

Modelos ocultos de Markov para el análisis de patrones espaciales. Los modelos ocultos de Markov (HMM) constituyen una herramienta de modelización altamente flexible, inicialmente utilizada en el campo del reconocimiento automático del habla, que ha encontrado en los últimos años numerosas aplicaciones en áreas científico-técnicas muy diversas, aun...

We investigated the spatial patterns of perennial species (Stipa tenacissima, Anthyllis cytisoides Globularia alypum, Brachypodium retusum and chamaephytes) in a 50 m × 50 m semi-arid steppe by using the combination of a linear model of coregionalization (LMC) and sampling units of varying size (1.25 m × 1.25 m, 2.5 m × 2.5 m, and 5 m × 5 m). The d...

Pinus halepensis has been extensively planted in semi-arid areas throughout the world. This has often led to slow-growth stands that: a) suffer from insect plagues, b) promote nutrient depletion and c) fail to promote the recovery of native vegetation. The introduction of native late-successional shrubs in these stands could stimulate successional...

Pines have been extensively used for land restoration in the Mediterranean basin and in other parts of the world, since the late 19th century. The theoretical basis supporting pine utilisation was its stress-tolerant and pioneer features, and their attributed role of facilitating the development of late-successional hardwoods in the long-term. In t...