My research focuses on the study of biological diversity (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 to address this fascinating theme include field ecology, molecular genetics, and theoretical ecology.
1. Sampling ecological interactions presents similar challenges, problems, potential biases and c... more 1. Sampling ecological interactions presents similar challenges, problems, potential biases and constraints as sampling individuals and species in biodiversity inventories. Robust estimates of the actual number of interactions (links) within diversified ecological networks require adequate sampling effort that needs to be explicitly gauged. Yet we still lack a sampling theory explicitly focusing on ecological interactions. 2. While the complete inventory of interactions is likely impossible, a robust characterization of its main patterns and metrics is probably realistic. We must acknowledge that a sizeable fraction of the maximum number of interactions Imax among, say, A animal species and P plant species (i.e. Imax 1⁄4 AP) is impossible to record due to forbidden links, that is life-history restrictions. Thus, the number of observed interactions I in robustly sampled networks is typically I\\Imax, resulting in sparse interaction matrices with low connectance. 3. Here I provide a r...
SUMMARY The mutualistic interactions between flowering plants (17 species) and their floral visit... more SUMMARY The mutualistic interactions between flowering plants (17 species) and their floral visitors (60 species, including lacertid lizards, passerine birds and insects) were intensively recorded during the spring
1. Sampling ecological interactions presents similar challenges, problems, potential biases, and ... more 1. Sampling ecological interactions presents similar challenges, problems, potential biases, and constraints as sampling individuals and species in biodiversity inventories. Interactions are just pairwise relationships among individuals of two different species, such as those among plants and their seed dispersers in frugivory interactions or those among plants and their pollinators. Sampling interactions is a fundamental step to build robustly estimated interaction networks, yet few analyses have attempted a formal approach to their sampling protocols. 2. Robust estimates of the actual number of interactions (links) within diversified ecological networks require adequate sampling effort that needs to be explicitly gauged. Yet we still lack a sampling theory explicitly focusing on ecological interactions. 3. While the complete inventory of interactions is likely impossible, a robust characterization of its main patterns and metrics is probably realistic. We must acknowledge that a s...
Reflexiones sobre la conservación ex situ y sus fundamentos científicos ¿Cuándo son necesarios lo... more Reflexiones sobre la conservación ex situ y sus fundamentos científicos ¿Cuándo son necesarios los proyectos de reintroducción de especies? Las medidas de conservación de especies pueden aplicarse sobre el terreno [in situ) o dirigirse hacia la cría en cautividad y posterior reintroducción de los ejemplares obtenidos (ex situ]. ¿Cuándo debe elegirse una и otra opción? Según los firmantes, todo debería depender de si las poblaciones han alcanzado o no un determinado tamaño crítico. por Ai. Díaz, K. Barba, A. Barbosa, E. de Juana, P.Jordano, F. deLtfie, J. ...
... Ao professor José Roberto Trigo por ceder seu laboratório na UNICAMP e pela valiosa ajuda com... more ... Ao professor José Roberto Trigo por ceder seu laboratório na UNICAMP e pela valiosa ajuda com as análises químicas. Ao ... Castro, Rodrigo Anzolin, Rodrigo Goiano, Rafael, Omelete e Saldanha. As minhas amigas-irmãs de república, atuais e antigas, Fá, Malu, Dani, Juli e ...
Biodiversity is more than a collection of individual species. It is the combination of biological... more 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 their functional outcomes. Quantifying biodiversity’s interactome (the whole suite of interactions among biotic organisms) is challenging not just because of the daunting task of describing ecosystem complexity, it’s also limited by the need to define and establish a proper grammar to record and catalog species interactions. Actually, a record of a pairwise interaction between two species can be identified as a "tetranomial species", with just a concatenation of the two Latin binomials. Thus sampling interactions requires solving exactly the same constraints and problems we face when sampling biodiversity. In real interaction webs, t...
Mutualistic interactions repeatedly preserved across fragmented landscapes can scale-up to form a... more Mutualistic interactions repeatedly preserved across fragmented landscapes can scale-up to form a spatial metanetwork describing the distribution of interactions across patches. We explored the structure of a bird seed-dispersal (BSD) metanetwork in 16 Neotropical forest fragments to test whether a distinct subset of BSD-interactions may mediate landscape functional connectivity. The metanetwork is interaction-rich, modular and poorly connected, showing high beta-diversity and turnover of species and interactions. Interactions involving large-sized species were lost in fragments < 10 000 ha, indicating a strong filtering by habitat fragmentation on the functional diversity of BSD-interactions. Persistent interactions were performed by small-seeded, fast growing plant species and by generalist, small-bodied bird species able to cross the fragmented landscape. This reduced subset of interactions forms the metanetwork components persisting to defaunation and fragmentation, and may g...
Ecological interactions have been acknowledged to play a key role in shaping biodiversity. Yet a ... more Ecological interactions have been acknowledged to play a key role in shaping biodiversity. Yet a major challenge for evolutionary biology is to understand the role of ecological interactions in shaping trait evolution when progressing from pairs of interacting species to multispecies interaction networks. Here we introduce an approach that integrates coevolutionary dynamics and network structure. Our results show that non-interacting species can be as important as directly interacting species in shaping coevolution within mutualistic assemblages. The contribution of indirect effects differs among types of mutualism. Indirect effects are more likely to predominate in nested, species-rich networks formed by multiple-partner mutualisms, such as pollination or seed dispersal by animals, than in small and modular networks formed by intimate mutualisms, such as those between host plants and their protective ants. Coevolutionary pathways of indirect effects favour ongoing trait evolution b...
The dataset provided here includes 8320 frugivory interactions (records of pairwise interactions ... more The dataset provided here includes 8320 frugivory interactions (records of pairwise interactions between plant and frugivore species) reported for the Atlantic Forest. The dataset includes interactions between 331 vertebrate species (232 birds, 90 mammals, five fishes, one amphibian and three reptiles) and 788 plant species. We also present information on traits directly related to the frugivory process (endozoochory), such as the size of fruits and seeds and the body mass and gape size of frugivores. Data were extracted from 166 published and unpublished sources spanning from 1961 to 2016. While this is probably the most comprehensive dataset available for a tropical ecosystem, it is arguably taxonomically and geographically biased. The plant families better represented are Melastomataceae, Myrtaceae, Moraceae, Urticaceae and Solanaceae. Myrsine coriacea, Alchornea glandulosa, Cecropia pachystachya, and Trema micrantha are the plant species with the most animal dispersers (83, 76, ...
1. Sampling ecological interactions presents similar challenges, problems, potential biases and c... more 1. Sampling ecological interactions presents similar challenges, problems, potential biases and constraints as sampling individuals and species in biodiversity inventories. Robust estimates of the actual number of interactions (links) within diversified ecological networks require adequate sampling effort that needs to be explicitly gauged. Yet we still lack a sampling theory explicitly focusing on ecological interactions. 2. While the complete inventory of interactions is likely impossible, a robust characterization of its main patterns and metrics is probably realistic. We must acknowledge that a sizeable fraction of the maximum number of interactions Imax among, say, A animal species and P plant species (i.e. Imax 1⁄4 AP) is impossible to record due to forbidden links, that is life-history restrictions. Thus, the number of observed interactions I in robustly sampled networks is typically I\\Imax, resulting in sparse interaction matrices with low connectance. 3. Here I provide a r...
SUMMARY The mutualistic interactions between flowering plants (17 species) and their floral visit... more SUMMARY The mutualistic interactions between flowering plants (17 species) and their floral visitors (60 species, including lacertid lizards, passerine birds and insects) were intensively recorded during the spring
1. Sampling ecological interactions presents similar challenges, problems, potential biases, and ... more 1. Sampling ecological interactions presents similar challenges, problems, potential biases, and constraints as sampling individuals and species in biodiversity inventories. Interactions are just pairwise relationships among individuals of two different species, such as those among plants and their seed dispersers in frugivory interactions or those among plants and their pollinators. Sampling interactions is a fundamental step to build robustly estimated interaction networks, yet few analyses have attempted a formal approach to their sampling protocols. 2. Robust estimates of the actual number of interactions (links) within diversified ecological networks require adequate sampling effort that needs to be explicitly gauged. Yet we still lack a sampling theory explicitly focusing on ecological interactions. 3. While the complete inventory of interactions is likely impossible, a robust characterization of its main patterns and metrics is probably realistic. We must acknowledge that a s...
Reflexiones sobre la conservación ex situ y sus fundamentos científicos ¿Cuándo son necesarios lo... more Reflexiones sobre la conservación ex situ y sus fundamentos científicos ¿Cuándo son necesarios los proyectos de reintroducción de especies? Las medidas de conservación de especies pueden aplicarse sobre el terreno [in situ) o dirigirse hacia la cría en cautividad y posterior reintroducción de los ejemplares obtenidos (ex situ]. ¿Cuándo debe elegirse una и otra opción? Según los firmantes, todo debería depender de si las poblaciones han alcanzado o no un determinado tamaño crítico. por Ai. Díaz, K. Barba, A. Barbosa, E. de Juana, P.Jordano, F. deLtfie, J. ...
... Ao professor José Roberto Trigo por ceder seu laboratório na UNICAMP e pela valiosa ajuda com... more ... Ao professor José Roberto Trigo por ceder seu laboratório na UNICAMP e pela valiosa ajuda com as análises químicas. Ao ... Castro, Rodrigo Anzolin, Rodrigo Goiano, Rafael, Omelete e Saldanha. As minhas amigas-irmãs de república, atuais e antigas, Fá, Malu, Dani, Juli e ...
Biodiversity is more than a collection of individual species. It is the combination of biological... more 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 their functional outcomes. Quantifying biodiversity’s interactome (the whole suite of interactions among biotic organisms) is challenging not just because of the daunting task of describing ecosystem complexity, it’s also limited by the need to define and establish a proper grammar to record and catalog species interactions. Actually, a record of a pairwise interaction between two species can be identified as a "tetranomial species", with just a concatenation of the two Latin binomials. Thus sampling interactions requires solving exactly the same constraints and problems we face when sampling biodiversity. In real interaction webs, t...
Mutualistic interactions repeatedly preserved across fragmented landscapes can scale-up to form a... more Mutualistic interactions repeatedly preserved across fragmented landscapes can scale-up to form a spatial metanetwork describing the distribution of interactions across patches. We explored the structure of a bird seed-dispersal (BSD) metanetwork in 16 Neotropical forest fragments to test whether a distinct subset of BSD-interactions may mediate landscape functional connectivity. The metanetwork is interaction-rich, modular and poorly connected, showing high beta-diversity and turnover of species and interactions. Interactions involving large-sized species were lost in fragments < 10 000 ha, indicating a strong filtering by habitat fragmentation on the functional diversity of BSD-interactions. Persistent interactions were performed by small-seeded, fast growing plant species and by generalist, small-bodied bird species able to cross the fragmented landscape. This reduced subset of interactions forms the metanetwork components persisting to defaunation and fragmentation, and may g...
Ecological interactions have been acknowledged to play a key role in shaping biodiversity. Yet a ... more Ecological interactions have been acknowledged to play a key role in shaping biodiversity. Yet a major challenge for evolutionary biology is to understand the role of ecological interactions in shaping trait evolution when progressing from pairs of interacting species to multispecies interaction networks. Here we introduce an approach that integrates coevolutionary dynamics and network structure. Our results show that non-interacting species can be as important as directly interacting species in shaping coevolution within mutualistic assemblages. The contribution of indirect effects differs among types of mutualism. Indirect effects are more likely to predominate in nested, species-rich networks formed by multiple-partner mutualisms, such as pollination or seed dispersal by animals, than in small and modular networks formed by intimate mutualisms, such as those between host plants and their protective ants. Coevolutionary pathways of indirect effects favour ongoing trait evolution b...
The dataset provided here includes 8320 frugivory interactions (records of pairwise interactions ... more The dataset provided here includes 8320 frugivory interactions (records of pairwise interactions between plant and frugivore species) reported for the Atlantic Forest. The dataset includes interactions between 331 vertebrate species (232 birds, 90 mammals, five fishes, one amphibian and three reptiles) and 788 plant species. We also present information on traits directly related to the frugivory process (endozoochory), such as the size of fruits and seeds and the body mass and gape size of frugivores. Data were extracted from 166 published and unpublished sources spanning from 1961 to 2016. While this is probably the most comprehensive dataset available for a tropical ecosystem, it is arguably taxonomically and geographically biased. The plant families better represented are Melastomataceae, Myrtaceae, Moraceae, Urticaceae and Solanaceae. Myrsine coriacea, Alchornea glandulosa, Cecropia pachystachya, and Trema micrantha are the plant species with the most animal dispersers (83, 76, ...
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