Nerea Abrego's research while affiliated with University of Helsinki and other places
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Publications (103)
Deadwood can be recreated as a forest restoration measure to increase the amount of deadwood and assist deadwood‐dependent biodiversity. While deadwood restoration is known to have an overall positive effect on associated species in the long term, it remains poorly understood how and when wood‐inhabiting organisms colonize different kinds of deadwo...
The Eltonian niche of a species is defined as its set of interactions with other taxa. How this set varies with biotic, abiotic and human influences is a core question of modern ecology. In seasonal environments, the realized Eltonian niche is likely to vary due to periodic changes in the occurrence and abundance of interaction partners and changes...
Through their ephemeral reproductive structures (fruiting bodies), ectomycorrhizal forest soil fungi provide a resource for a plethora of organisms. Thus, resolving what biotic and abiotic factors determine the occurrence and abundance of fruiting bodies is fundamental for understanding the dynamics of forest trophic networks. While the influence o...
Despite host‐fungal symbiotic interactions being ubiquitous in all ecosystems, understanding how symbiosis has shaped the ecology and evolution of fungal spores that are involved in dispersal and colonization of their hosts has been ignored in life‐history studies. We assembled a spore morphology database covering over 26,000 species of free‐living...
Across free-living organisms, the ecology and evolution of offspring morphology is shaped by interactions with biotic and abiotic environments during dispersal and early establishment in new habitats. However, the ecology and evolution of offspring morphology for symbiotic species has been largely ignored despite host-symbiont interactions being ub...
Aim:
Understanding the variation in community composition and species abundances (i.e., β-diversity) is at the heart of community ecology. A common approach to examine β-diversity is to evaluate directional variation in community composition by measuring the decay in the similarity among pairs of communities along spatial or environmental distance...
Knowledge about the distribution and local diversity patterns of arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi are limited for extreme environments such as the Arctic, where most studies have focused on spore morphology or root colonization. We here studied the joint effects of plant species identity and elevation on AM fungal distribution and diversity.
We sa...
Interactions among fungi and insects involve hundreds of thousands of species. While insect communities on plants have formed some of the classic model systems in ecology, fungus‐based communities and the forces structuring them remain poorly studied by comparison. We characterize the arthropod communities associated with fruiting bodies of eight m...
Identifying the spatial scales at which community assembly processes operate is fundamental for gaining a mechanistic understanding of the drivers shaping ecological communities. In this study, we examined whether and how traits and phylogenetic relationships structure fungal community assembly across spatial scales.
We applied joint species distri...
The interest in studying wood-inhabiting fungal communities has grown in recent years. This interest has mainly been motivated by the important roles of wood-inhabiting fungi in ecosystem functioning (e.g. nutrient cycling) and conservation biology (e.g. their sensitivity to forest management). In this paper, I argue that another important, but yet...
Species co-occurrences in local communities can arise independent or dependent on species’ niches. However, the role of niche-dependent processes has not been thoroughly deciphered when generalized to biogeographical scales, probably due to combined shortcomings of data and methodology. Here, we explored the influence of environmental filtering and...
Species interactions are known to structure ecological communities. Still, the influence of climate change on biodiversity has primarily been evaluated by correlating individual species distributions with local climatic descriptors, then extrapolating into future climate scenarios. We ask whether predictions on arctic arthropod response to climate...
Understanding the variation in community composition and species abundances, i.e., β-diversity, is at the heart of community ecology. A common approach to examine β-diversity is to evaluate directional turnover in community composition by measuring the decay in the similarity among pairs of communities along spatial or environmental distances. We p...
The regional origin of a food product commonly affects its value. To this, DNA-based identification of tissue remains could offer fine resolution. For honey, this would allow the usage of not only pollen but all plant tissue, and also that of microbes in the product, for discerning the origin. Here we examined how plant, bacterial and fungal taxa i...
Land-use changes are a main driver of modifications in tropical ecosystems, leading to the loss of species and ecological traits and affecting key ecological functions. Although much attention has been given to predict the effects of species loss on ecological processes, information on the large-scale effects of land-use changes over ecological fun...
Fungal-bacterial interactions play a key role in the functioning of many ecosystems. Thus, understanding their interactive dynamics is of central importance for gaining predictive knowledge on ecosystem functioning. However, it is challenging to disentangle the mechanisms behind species associations from observed co-occurrence patterns, and little...
In a warming world, changes in climate may result in species‐level responses as well as changes in community structure through knock‐on effects on ecological interactions such as predation and herbivory. Yet, the links between these responses at different levels are still inadequately understood. Assessing how microclimatic conditions affect each o...
Inferring interspecific interactions indirectly from community data is of central interest in community ecology. Data on species communities can be surveyed using different methods, each of which may differ in the amount and type of species detected, and thus produce varying information on interaction networks. Since fruit bodies reflect only a fra...
How community‐level specialization differs among groups of organisms, and changes along environmental gradients, is fundamental to understanding the mechanisms influencing ecological communities. In this paper, we investigate the specialization of root‐associated fungi for plant species, asking whether the level of specialization varies with elevat...
Increasing evidence suggests that degradation of biodiversity in human populated areas is a threat for the ecosystem processes that are relevant for human well-being. Fungi are a megadiverse kingdom that plays a key role in ecosystem processes and affects human well-being. How urbanization influences fungi has remained poorly understood, partially...
Understanding the role of interspecific interactions in shaping ecological communities is one of the central goals in community ecology. In fungal communities, measuring interspecific interactions directly is challenging because these communities are composed of large numbers of species, many of which are unculturable. An indirect way of assessing...
Cambridge Core - Ecology and Conservation - Joint Species Distribution Modelling - by Otso Ovaskainen
Unlike for many other organism groups, conservation translocations of fungi are still rare. Encouraged by recent successful translocations, there is a growing interest in applying this conservation tool to threatened wood-inhabiting fungi. When combined with other conservation or restoration measures, translocation can be an effective measure for p...
The kingdom Fungi is a megadiverse group represented in all ecosystem types. The global diversity and distribution of fungal taxa are poorly known, in part due to the limitations related to traditional fruit-body survey methods. These previous hurdles are now being overcome by rapidly developing DNA-based surveys. Past fungal DNA surveys have predo...
Defaunation is considered one of the main drivers of modifications in tropical ecosystems, extirpating many large-sized vertebrates, which in turn compromises key ecological functions. Although much attention has been given to predict the effects of species loss on ecological processes, there is a lack of information on the large-scale effects of d...
Habitat loss is one of the key drivers of the ongoing decline of biodiversity. However, ecologists still argue about how fragmentation of habitat (independent of habitat loss) affects species richness. The recently proposed habitat amount hypothesis posits that species richness only depends on the total amount of habitat in a local landscape. In co...
Joint Species Distribution Modelling (JSDM) is becoming an increasingly popular statistical method for analysing data in community ecology. Hierarchical Modelling of Species Communities (HMSC) is a general and flexible framework for fitting JSDMs. HMSC allows the integration of community ecology data with data on environmental covariates, species t...
Aim
Forest fragmentation is among the principal causes of global biodiversity loss, yet how it affects mutualistic interactions between plants and animals at large spatial scale is poorly understood. In particular, tropical forest regeneration depends on animal‐mediated seed dispersal, but the seed‐dispersing animals face rapid decline due to fores...
The ongoing global change and the increased interest in macroecological processes call for the analysis of spatially extensive data on species communities to understand and forecast distributional changes of biodiversity. Recently developed joint species distribution models can deal with numerous species efficiently, while explicitly accounting for...
Dead wood profile of a forest is a useful tool for describing forest characteristics and assessing forest disturbance history. Nevertheless, dead wood profiles, including both coarse and fine dead wood, are rare as well as studies on the effect of sampling intensity on the dead wood estimates. In a semi-natural boreal forest, we measured every dead...
Tree species is one of the most important determinants of wood-inhabiting fungal community composition, yet its relationship with fungal reproductive and dispersal traits remains poorly understood. We studied fungal communities (total of 657 species) inhabiting broadleaved and coniferous dead wood (total of 192 logs) in 12 semi-natural boreal fores...
A key challenge for community ecology is to understand to what extent observational data can be used to infer the underlying community assembly processes. As different processes can lead to similar or even identical patterns, statistical analyses of non‐manipulative observational data never yield undisputable causal inference on the underlying proc...
A large array of species distribution model (SDM) approaches have been developed for explaining and predicting the occurrences of individual species or species assemblages. Given the wealth of existing models, it is unclear which models perform best for interpolation or extrapolation of existing data sets, particularly when one is concerned with sp...
Joint Species Distribution Modelling (JSDM) is becoming an increasingly popular statistical method for analyzing data in community ecology. JSDM allow the integration of community ecology data with data on environmental covariates, species traits, phylogenetic relationships, and the spatio-temporal context of the study, providing predictive insight...
Aim
Beech forests comprise a globally unique temperate forest type in Europe. The dominance of beech in these forests developed during the ongoing post‐glacial northward re‐colonization, concurrently with intensified forest use by humans. We investigated how these two processes together with climate shaped the patterns of functional diversity of tw...
Analyzing the structure and dynamics of biotic interaction networks and the processes shaping them is currently one of the key fields in ecology. In this paper, we develop a novel approach to gut content analysis, thereby deriving a new perspective on community interactions and their responses to environment. For this, we use an elevational gradien...
Incompleteness of reference sequence databases and unresolved taxonomic relationships complicates taxonomic placement of fungal sequences. We developed Protax ‐fungi, a general tool for taxonomic placement of fungal internal transcribed spacer ( ITS ) sequences, and implemented it into the PlutoF platform of the UNITE database for molecular identif...
Habitat loss is one of the key drivers of the ongoing decline of biodiversity. However, ecologists still argue about how fragmentation of habitat (independent of habitat loss) affects species richness. The recently proposed habitat amount hypothesis posits that species richness only depends on the total amount of habitat in a local landscape. On th...
Fruiting bodies of fungi constitute an important resource for thousands of other taxa. The structure of these diverse assemblages has traditionally been studied with labour‐intensive methods involving cultivation and morphology‐based species identification, to which molecular information might offer convenient complements. To overcome challenges in...
Protected areas are meant to preserve native local communities within their boundaries, but they are not independent from their surroundings. Impoverished habitat quality in the matrix might influence the species composition within the protected areas through biotic homogenization. The aim of this study was to determine the impacts of matrix qualit...
Snow conditions are important drivers of the distribution and phenology of Arctic flora and fauna, but the extent and effects of local variation in snowmelt are still inadequately studied. We analyze snowmelt patterns within the Zackenberg valley in northeast Greenland. Drawing on landscape-level snowmelt dates and meteorological data from a centra...
Aim
Aphyllophoroid fungi are associated with plants, either using plants as a resource (as parasites or decomposers) or as symbionts (as mycorrhizal partners). In spite of their strong association with plants, it is unknown how much plant distributions determine their biogeographical patterns compared with environmental factors such as climate and...
Fungi are a megadiverse group of organisms, they play major roles in ecosystem functioning, and are important for human health, food production, and nature conservation. Our knowledge on fungal diversity and fungal ecology is however still very limited, in part because surveying and identifying fungi is time demanding and requires expert knowledge....
Estimation of intra- and interspecific interactions from time-series on species-rich communities is challenging due to the high number of potentially interacting species pairs. The previously proposed sparse interactions model overcomes this challenge by assuming that most species pairs do not interact. We propose an alternative model that does not...
Poster presented at Arktiko Meeting, organised bu Finnish Academy of Science
Joint species distribution models ( JSDM ) are increasingly used to analyse community ecology data. Recent progress with JSDM s has provided ecologists with new tools for estimating species associations (residual co‐occurrence patterns after accounting for environmental niches) from large data sets, as well as for increasing the predictive power of...
Community ecology aims to understand what factors determine the assembly and dynamics of species assemblages at different spatiotemporal scales. To facilitate the integration between conceptual and statistical approaches in community ecology, we propose Hierarchical Modelling of Species Communities (HMSC) as a general, flexible framework for modern...
The identification of traits that influence the responses of the species to environmental variation provides a mechanistic perspective on the assembly processes of ecological communities. While much research linking functional ecology with assembly processes has been conducted with animals and plants, the development of predictive or even conceptua...
We assessed how environmental drivers influence the occurrences of wood-inhabiting macrofungi in European beech forests, using an extensive dataset of fruit body records collected in 53 reserves across twelve European countries. We found that the 105 species included in this study varied greatly in their responses to covariates related to resource...