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Introduction
Native from Madrid. Environmental Biologist (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid). Master and Doctor of Science (Instituto de Ecología A.C., Mexico). Postdoc at UNAM, Mexico. Full Researcher at UNAM since 2010. Member of the National Research System, top-level (III). UNAM Research Prize to Young Scientists (Natural Sciences). In our lab, we study the impact of land-use change on tropical plants and animals across different spatial scales - information of key relevance to inform conservation plans.
Additional affiliations
May 2018 - October 2018
November 2015 - December 2015
November 2014 - December 2014
Publications
Publications (226)
Land-use change pushes biodiversity into human-modified landscapes, where native ecosystems are surrounded by anthropic land covers (ALCs). Yet, the ability of species to use these emerging covers remains poorly understood. We quantified the use of ALCs by primates worldwide, and analyzed species' attributes that predict such use. Most species use...
Decades of research suggest that species richness depends on spatial characteristics of habitat patches, especially their size and isolation. In contrast, the habitat amount hypothesis predicts that: 1) species richness in plots of fixed size (species density) is more strongly and positively related to the amount of habitat around the plot than to...
Agriculture and development transform forest ecosystems to human-modified landscapes. Decades of research in ecology have generated myriad concepts for the appropriate management of these landscapes. Yet, these concepts are often contradictory and apply at different spatial scales, making the design of biodiversity-friendly landscapes challenging....
The legacy of the ‘SL > SS principle’, that a single or a few large habitat patches (SL) conserve more species than several small patches (SS), is evident in decisions to protect large patches while down-weighting small ones. However, empirical support for this principle is lacking, and most studies find either no difference or the opposite pattern...
Context The expansion of agricultural lands threatens biodiversity maintenance across the tropics. Although some agroforestry systems may be biodiversity-friendly, their conservation value likely depends on the landscape and regional contexts in which they are embedded – a poorly tested hypothesis.
Objectives We assessed the conservation value of...
Aim
For practical and theoretical purposes, ecological studies commonly classify trees into five major life‐cycle stages: seed, seedling, sapling, juvenile and adult. Whereas the seed and adult stages are usually accurately delimited across studies, there are discrepancies and ambiguity in the categorization of seedlings, saplings and juveniles, wh...
For prey exhibiting alternative antipredator strategies, selecting the most effective one is critical for survival. However, what determines such selection remains an open question. We hypothesised that this selection depends on prey skill.
We test this idea in Myrmeleon immaculatus De Geer, 1773 (Neuroptera: Myrmeleontidae) antlion larvae that exh...
Context
Slash-and-burn agriculture generates landscape mosaics composed of different land uses. Ecological theory postulates that in these mosaics, the structure of species assemblages depends on both local- and landscape-scale factors, but their relative role remains poorly known.
Objectives
Understanding the relative importance of local and land...
Tropical tree species are increasingly being pushed to inhabit deforested landscapes. The habitat amount hypothesis posits that, in remaining forest patches, species diversity in equal‐sized samples decreases with decreasing forest cover in the surrounding landscape. We tested this prediction by taking into account three important factors that can...
La pérdida y degradación de selvas (o bosques tropicales) ha alcanzado límites planetarios, amenazando la supervivencia de innumerables especies, incluida la especie humana. Esta crisis ha alertado a actores sociales y políticos quienes, preocupados por la urgente necesidad de recuperar estos valiosos ecosistemas, están implementando proyectos dest...
Protected areas are of paramount relevance to conserving wildlife and ecosystem contributions to people. Yet, their conservation success is increasingly threatened by human activities including habitat loss, climate change, pollution, and species overexploitation. Thus, understanding the underlying and proximate drivers of anthropogenic threats is...
Changes caused by anthropogenic disturbances are a major driver of local diversity, but their effects on the species replacement across space (β-diversity), remain poorly understood, particularly with respect to different life-stages and ecological groups. We investigated these effects by examining juvenile and adult assemblages of shade-tolerant a...
Seed rain is critical for forest recovery, especially in abandoned lands that have been exposed to agriculture. However, such a critical role depends on seed viability, which has been largely overlooked in most seed rain studies. We assessed the viability of 5378 seeds of 24 woody species in the seed rain falling into 12 plots from a Brazilian trop...
Understanding why animals avoid some locations is needed to improve the theory of habitat selection. This is key in semi‐sedentary organisms, such as antlion larvae, because once established they rarely move, and their performance largely depends on local environmental conditions.
Antlion larvae are sit‐and‐wait predators that build conical pitfall...
Biotic communities in heterogeneous agricultural landscapes can be shaped by both the land use of local patches and the structure of surrounding landscapes. However, studies usually focus on one or the other factor, limiting our ability to propose management guidelines for the conservation of biodiversity in human‐modified landscapes.
We used a sit...
Habitat loss has major impacts on biodiversity. Yet, such impacts are not always linear, as there can be thresholds values of habitat amount below which species become extirpated from human-modified landscapes (extinction thresholds). This may be particularly the case for species with high habitat spatial requirements, especially in regions with a...
Protected areas (PAs) are essential for biodiversity conservation, but their restrictive policies could accentuate poverty. Such a possibility may occur with the more restrictive PAs (e.g., national parks), which prioritize conservation while limiting the use of natural resources. However, less restrictive PAs, such as biosphere reserves, which all...
Purpose of Review
Species at a site interact with environmental variables of the surrounding landscape, but the spatial extent (scale) at which such interaction is strongest (“scale of effect,” SOE) varies among species. SOE is hypothesized to be driven mainly by species’ mobility, as a more mobile species should interact with environmental variabl...
Abandonment of agricultural lands promotes the global expansion of secondary forests, which are critical for preserving biodiversity and ecosystem functions and services. Such roles largely depend, however, on two essential successional attributes, trajectory and recovery rate, which are expected to depend on landscape-scale forest cover in non-lin...
Forest's recovery potential in human-modified landscapes is increasingly threatened by agricultural activities that disrupt critical sources of forest regeneration, such as the seed rain. Slash-and-burn agriculture is a good example. By slashing and burning the vegetation, this farming method can promote seed source and seed dispersal limitation, b...
Worldwide deforestation and degradation are limiting the capacity of tropical dry forests (TDFs) to provide environmental services. Agroforestry systems (AFSs) are agricultural land systems that combining perennial elements with crops, can provide important benefits to people (e.g. timber and non-timber products) and the environment (e.g. hosting b...
Landscape‐scale deforestation poses a major threat to global biodiversity, not only because it limits habitat availability, but also because it can drive the degradation of the remaining habitat. However, the multiple pathways by which deforestation directly and indirectly affects wildlife remain poorly understood, especially for elusive forest‐dep...
Humans are promoting drastic changes in biological communities that result in ‘winner-loser’ species replacements across multiple spatial scales. In tropical regions, such replacements can be particularly driven by deforestation, especially in landscapes devoted to free-ranging livestock production in which mixing native and exotic species can crea...
Understanding how biological communities respond to human-caused landscape disturbances is urgently needed to identify optimal spatial scenarios for preserving biodiversity in anthropogenic landscapes. Forest loss is increasingly cited as a major disturbance in these landscapes, but its impact on biodiversity in mountain regions with high endemism...
Context
Old-growth forest loss drives the global biodiversity crisis. Nevertheless, this impact could be buffered by the increasing expansion of secondary (regenerating) forests, which can provide supplementary habitat for wildlife.
Objectives
We tested this hypothesis assessing the effect of old-growth and secondary forest cover on the abundance...
Deforestation of old-growth forests (OGF) is a significant driver of biodiversity loss, particularly impacting rare species. However, the threat to dominant species is usually overlooked, given their relatively high abundance. Therefore, assessing the impact of forest loss on dominant species is imperative, mainly because they play critical roles i...
Landscape‐level disturbances, such as forest loss, can profoundly alter the functional composition and diversity of biotic assemblages. In fact, the landscape‐moderated functional trait selection (LMFTS) hypothesis states that landscape‐level disturbances may act as environmental filters that select a set of species with disturbance‐adapted attribu...
Tropical forests are being rapidly deforested worldwide. The remaining forest is distributed in different-sized forest patches, but the species preservation value of small patches remains debated. Some studies suggest that edge effect can decrease forest-specialist species diversity, particularly in small patches, which are expected to be mainly oc...
The conservation of tropical biodiversity not only depends on forest remnants, but also on
anthropogenic land covers. Some shade crops are considered wildlife-friendly agroecosystems, but their conservation value is context- and taxon-dependent. Amphibians and reptiles have received less attention despite their high sensitivity to habitat disturban...
Context. Biodiversity patterns depend on landscape structure, but the spatial scale at which such dependence is strongest (scale of effect, SoE) remains poorly understood, especially for elusive species such as arboreal tropical mammals.
Objectives. To identify the SoE of arboreal mammals and assess whether it depends on the biological response and...
Seed dispersal by animals can be negatively affected by selective logging, but this topic remains poorly understood. We investigated how selective logging impacts the quantity of seed dispersal, focusing on a highly frugivorous primate, Ateles geoffroyi yucatanensis, in Calakmul, Mexico. We assessed whether seed dispersal by the spider monkey diffe...
Protected areas can prevent forest loss, but their effects on forest fragmentation and forest regrowth are poorly understood. Furthermore, the importance of protected areas in shaping these forest spatial changes may depend on different socioeconomic drivers (e.g. population size, distance to cities, proportion of local people working in non-farm o...
Forest ecosystems are increasingly threatened by unsustainable agricultural practices, especially by those that damage their regenerative potential. This can be the case of slash-and-burn agriculture – a farming method that can negatively impact the soil seed bank, potentially limiting the resilience of forest ecosystems. To test this hypothesis, a...
ContextForest loss and fragmentation are rapidly expanding across the tropics. Although forest loss is a major driver of the current biodiversity crisis, the effect of fragmentation remains debated, particularly for forest-specialist species.Objectives
We evaluated the univariate and combined effect of forest loss (percent of forest cover) and frag...
Con la creciente pérdida y fragmentación de los ecosistemas naturales, entender cómo responden las especies a estos cambios nunca ha sido más urgente. Hoy existe consenso acerca del fuerte impacto negativo de la pérdida de hábitat sobre la biodiversidad. Sin embargo, el efecto de la fragmentación del hábitat ha sido muy debatido. En esta revisión,...
We document the first verifiable records of Claudius angustatus Cope, 1865 in the Selva Lacandona, Chiapas, Mexico. Three individuals were observed in different types of anthropic land covers. These records are the most recent observations of C. angustatus in the southeastern zone of its range in more than 20 years, thus representing the southernmo...
Understanding the factors and mechanisms shaping differences in species composition across space and time (β‐diversity) in human‐modified landscapes has key ecological and applied implications. This topic is, however, challenging because landscape disturbance can promote either decreases (biotic homogenization) or increases (biotic differentiation)...
Landscape connectivity has a long history, with three distinct origins. Merriam connectivity (1984) is the interaction between a species’ movement attributes and the landscape structure, which influences movement rate between habitat patches and thereby, population persistence. Noss connectivity (1987) is the extent to which patches are connected t...
The exploitation of non-timber forest products (NTFPs) has been encouraged in order to reconcile economic uses, biodiversity conservation and the provision of ecosystem services. In this paper we investigate how increments on the açaí palm density (Euterpe oleracea) via forest management change tree assemblages across 47 plots in the Amazon estuari...
Aim
Here we examine the functional profile of regional tree species pools across the latitudinal distribution of Neotropical moist forests, and test trait–climate relationships among local communities. We expected opportunistic strategies (acquisitive traits, small seeds) to be overrepresented in species pools further from the equator, but also in...
Land‐use change threatens biodiversity in tropical landscapes, but its impact on rainforest regeneration remains poorly known. In fact, the landscape‐scale patterns driving the diversity of regenerating plants within forest fragments have been rarely explored, and we are uncertain whether such drivers vary across regions with different land‐use cha...
Biodiversity maintenance in human-modified landscapes largely depends on spatial variations in species composition (β-diversity), but the impact of human disturbance on β-diversity remains poorly understood. We examined how taxonomic and phylogenetic β-diversity of woody plant communities in the Brazilian Caatinga dry forest respond to two emerging...
Deforestation has carved tropical forest landscapes into millions of different-sized patches worldwide. Research has focused on the effect of patch size on biodiversity, while neglecting patch quality effects and leaving geographic and interspecific variance to patch attributes largely unexamined. Here, we assess how patch size and quality affect t...
Banks-Leite et al. (2021) claim that our suggestion of preserving ≥40% forest cover lacks evidence and can be problematic. We find these claims unfounded, and discuss why conservation planning urgently requires valuable, well-supported, and feasible general guidelines like the 40% criterion. Using region-specific thresholds worldwide is unfeasible...
Context
Tropical forests are great reservoirs of carbon but they still suffer high rates of deforestation despite their importance. Yet, large uncertainty remains about the effects of landscape-level forest loss on biomass of forest remnants, and how these effects vary with disturbance intensity at larger regional scales.
Objectives
We evaluated w...
Land use change is a major threat to species’ persistence. Yet, the landscape attributes that shape populations remain poorly understood. Landscape-scale forest cover and matrix quality can favor population persistence, while forest fragmentation per se usually has weak effects on species. The impact of these spatial changes can, however, be influe...
Banks-Leite et al. (2021) claim that our suggestion of preserving ≥40% forest cover lacks evidence and can be problematic. We find these claims unfounded, and discuss why conservation planning urgently requires valuable, well-supported, and feasible general guidelines like the 40% criterion. Using region-specific thresholds worldwide is unfeasible...
In biodiversity conservation, the “SL > SS principle” that a single (or few) large habitat patches (SL) conserve more species than several small patches (SS) is used to prioritize protection of large patches while down-weighting small ones. However, empirical support for this principle is lacking; most studies find SS > SL. We propose a research ag...
Patch size is considered a major driver of species diversity in fragmented landscapes. Yet, assemblages of forest-dependent species, such as tropical arboreal mammals, can also depend on vegetation characteristics within the patch, i.e. patch quality. To test this, we assessed the influence of patch size and quality (measured through six attributes...
Regenerating forests after agricultural land abandonment are increasingly common in human-modified tropical landscapes. These secondary forests preserve biodiversity and provide multiple ecosystem services, but such important roles depend on their recovery rates, which can be difficult to predict. Recovery is expected to occur faster when landscape...
[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1093/biosci/biaa082.].
This study presents the floristic list of regenerating trees, shrubs and palms sampled in 60 tropical rainforests fragments in 3 different regions (n = 20 per region): Marqués de Comillas (Chiapas), Los Tuxtlas (Veracruz) and northern region of Chiapas. In each fragment, we recorded saplings in 25 8 m2-circular plots (200 m2 per fragment). In total...
Fragmented tropical forests can be highly dynamic, with the spatial configuration of forest patches changing through time. Yet, the lack of longitudinal studies limits our understanding of how patch dynamics affect biodiversity, especially when there is a time lag in species extinctions (extinction debt). We assessed how temporal changes in patch s...
Threats to biodiversity are well documented. However, to effectively conserve species and their habitats, we need to know which conservation interventions do (or do not) work. Evidence-based conservation evaluates interventions within a scientific framework. The Conservation Evidence project has summarized thousands of studies testing conservation...
Context The role of protected areas as biodiversity repositories has become
increasingly important in face of increased deforestation. By adding free-living exotic
mammals, removing forest-dependent native ones, isolating forest patches from large
protected areas and reducing landscape forest cover, human activities may drive mammal communities tow...
Context
Theoretical models propose that the spatial extent at which landscape structure best predicts species responses (scale of effect, SoE) depends on habitat and dietary specialization, landscape metrics, and response variables. However, empirical support for such models is scarce, especially for apex predators.
Objectives
To determine SoE for...
Vulnerability to habitat fragmentation
Habitat fragmentation caused by human activities has consequences for the distribution and movement of organisms. Betts et al. present a global analysis of how exposure to habitat fragmentation affects the composition of ecological communities (see the Perspective by Hargreaves). In a dataset consisting of 448...
Land‐use change modifies the spatial structure of tropical landscapes, shaping global biodiversity patterns. Yet, it remains unknown how key ecological processes, such as seed dispersal, can be affected by changes in landscape patterns, and whether such effects differ among regions with different climate and disturbance intensity. We assessed the e...
Actividades productivas como la ganadería y la agricultura están promoviendo la expansión acelerada de paisajes antrópicos (PAs). Estos paisajes están compuestos por diferentes tipos de coberturas (e.g. vegetación nativa, cultivos, pastizales, asentamientos humanos), cada una de ellas con diferente geometría y arreglo espacial (e.g. número, tamaño,...
Context: Non-human primates are among the most threatened mammals on Earth. Although some species, such as howler monkeys, are thought to be resistant to initial phases of habitat disturbance, the lack of longitudinal studies prevents determining if this holds over time.
Objectives: We assessed temporal changes in landscape structure in the Lacand...
Context
Conversion of forest ecosystems to human-modified landscapes threatens the persistence of forest-specialist species. However, the local and landscape drivers of population abundance and genetic diversity of these species are largely unknown, especially for elusive and critically endangered species, such as the salamander Pseudoeurycea rober...
Ecosystems largely depend, for both their functioning and their ecological integrity, on the ecological traits of the species that inhabit them. Non-human primates have a wide geographic distribution and play vital roles in ecosystem structure, function, and resilience. However, there is no comprehensive and updated compilation of information on ec...