Pedro J Rey

Universidad de Jaén | UJAEN · Department of Animal Biology, Vegetal Biology and Ecology

Anthropogenic climate change (ACC) significantly impacts plant populations, biodiversity, and ecosystem services. The survival of plant species hinges on their ability to adapt or migrate in pace with shifting climate niches, which is key for maintaining gene flow and habitat colonization in changing environments. This study investigates the mechan...

Perennial plants create productive and biodiverse hotspots, known as fertile islands, beneath their canopies. These hotspots largely determine the structure and functioning of drylands worldwide. Despite their ubiquity, the factors controlling fertile islands under conditions of contrasting grazing by livestock, the most prevalent land use in dryla...

Las sierras Béticas, con una extensión inferior al 8% de la Península ibérica, contienen el 45% de su flora. Hay casos como el de Sierra Nevada, que representando sólo el 0,4% de la superficie peninsular, contiene el 25% de su flora, alcanzando en las cumbres un 30-40% de endemismos. Con una aproximación multidisciplinar, abordamos la dimensión de...

Seed dispersal by frugivores is a key ecological process underpinning the functionality of woodland patches and their capacity to maintain biodiversity in agricultural landscapes. Resident and migratory avian frugivores differ in temporal span of their local occurrence, as well as in mobility and territoriality. However, whether landscape homogeniz...

The Janzen-Connell hypothesis is one of the most important hypotheses in ecology, but is mostly tested indirectly without accounting for the underlying plant-associated organisms, or only for highly host-specific organisms. Advances in massive sequencing allow to sample, for example, the fungi communities associated with different plant species, an...

Plant recruitment interactions (i.e., what recruits under what) shape the composition, diversity, and structure of plant communities. Despite the huge body of knowledge on the mechanisms underlying recruitment interactions among species, we still know little about the structure of the recruitment networks emerging in ecological communities. Modelin...

Plant species bearing extrafloral nectaries (EFNs) may indirectly influence other plant species by sharing protective ants, potentially altering plant herbivory levels. However, the propagation of indirect effects in this type of mutualism has seldom been investigated. We investigated indirect effects via ant sharing among twenty-one EFN-bearing pl...

Plant recruitment interactions (i.e., who recruits under whom) between 3,318 vascular plant species across the globe

Small floral patches that coexist with crops in agricultural landscapes can function as biodiversity reservoirs. However, the influence of the landscape context and agricultural management on the capacity of these small green infrastructures to support diversity is poorly understood. Here, we evaluate the effect of landscape simplification, agricul...

Grazing represents the most extensive use of land worldwide. Yet its impacts on ecosystem services remain uncertain because pervasive interactions between grazing pressure, climate, soil properties, and biodiversity may occur but have never been addressed simultaneously. Using a standardized survey at 98 sites across six continents, we show that in...

Grazing represents the most extensive use of land worldwide. Yet its impacts on ecosystem services remain uncertain because pervasive interactions between grazing pressure, climate, soil properties, and biodiversity may occur but have never been addressed simultaneously. Using a standardized survey at 98 sites across six continents, we show that in...

Las aves son usadas como bioindicadores sensibles a la pérdida, fragmentación y degradación de los hábitats. Desempeñan además importantes servicios ecosistémicos en los medios agrícolas, como el control de plagas y patógenos o la dispersión de semillas y la conectividad del hábitat natural. Sin embargo, sus funciones y servicios están siendo impac...

Aim: We investigated taxonomic and functional beta diversity of bird communities inhabiting Mediterranean olive groves subject to either intensive or extensive management of the ground cover and located in landscapes with different degrees of complexity. Location: Andalusia, southern Spain. Methods: We partitioned taxonomic and functional beta dive...

Bees are a diverse group with more than 1000 species known from the Iberian Peninsula. They have increasingly received special attention due to their important role as pollinators and providers of ecosystem services. In addition, various rapid human-induced environmental changes are leading to the decline of some of its populations. However, we kno...

The analysis of the spatial phylogenetic and phenotypic structure of plant communities can provide insight into the underlying processes and interactions governing their assembly, and how these may change during plant ontogeny. We used point pattern analysis to find out if saplings and adult plants are surrounded by phylogenetically and phenotypica...

Agricultural systems lead to simplification and fragmentation of the landscape, as well as a loss of plant and animal diversity. Studying the interactions in these systems can be useful for detecting failures in natural processes that eventually result in a collapse of biodiversity and that may not be detected by studies aimed at assessing biodiver...

Farming impacts animal-mediated seed dispersal through mechanisms operating on at least two spatial scales. First, at the landscape scale, through habitat loss and land conversion to agriculture/livestock grazing, and second, at the farm scale, via a local intensification of agricultural practices. These two scales of farming impact seed dispersal...

Studies assessing anthropogenic disturbance impact on insect pollination function have attended fundamentally to changes on abundance and richness of pollinator assemblages while how the pollination function is affected by shifts in assemblage compositions is frequently neglected. Notwithstanding, different insect species/groups are distinctly impa...

Habitat loss and landscape degradation have severe consequences on gene flow of plant species, especially due to their effects on wild insect pollinator communities. These consequences have been amply studied in tropical and temperate regions, but poorly in semiarid environments. Here, we studied the variation of mating and gene flow patterns in an...

El proceso de intensificación agrícola que ha sufrido el olivar en las últimas décadas (eliminación de áreas naturales y uso de herbicidas) es uno de los desencadenantes de la disminución de avifauna asociada a este cultivo. Sin embargo, para diseñar acciones de conservación no solo podemos basarnos en indicadores genéricos de diversidad. La condic...

Aim We investigated taxonomic and functional beta diversity of bird communities inhabiting Mediterranean olive groves subject to either intensive or low‐intensity management of the ground cover and located in landscapes with different degrees of complexity. Location Andalusia, southern Spain. Methods We partitioned taxonomic and functional beta d...

La intensificación agrícola impacta sobre la biodiversidad tornando al cultivo vulnerable a sus plagas, requiriéndose pesticidas para controlarlas. El control integrado de plagas es una alternativa respetuosa con la biodiversidad, beneficiándose de sus servicios ecosistémicos. La mosca del olivo ocasiona cuantiosas pérdidas económicas en el olivar....

Agroforests are of well-known importance for biodiversity conservation, especially in the tropics, because they are structurally stable and may resemble natural forests. Previous studies have characterized jointly taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic diversity in these agro-ecosystems to comprehensively examine the mechanisms by which agriculture...

Seed dispersal by frugivores plays a key role in structuring and maintaining tree diversity in forests. However, little is known about how the spatial legacy of seed dispersal and early recruitment shapes spatial patterns and the spatial interaction network of plant species in mature forest communities. We analysed two fully mapped mixed Pine–Oak f...

Although avian-mediated pest control is a significant ecosystem service with important economic implications, few experimental studies have ever documented its role in Mediterranean agroforests. Specifically, information on pest control by birds is lacking in certain permanent agroecosystems of worldwide importance such as olive groves. Here, we as...

Agri‐Environmental Schemes (AES) have been proposed to mitigate the impact of agriculture on both taxonomic and functional biodiversity. However, a better knowledge of the mechanisms involved in the loss of agrobiodiversity is needed to implement efficient AES. An unbalanced effort on research towards arable lands compared to permanent crops, and o...

The next reform of the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) for the period 2021- 2027 (currently extended to 2023-2030) requires the approval by the European Commission of a Strategic Plan with environmental objectives for each Member State. Here we use the best available scientific evidence on the relationships between agricultural practices and bi...

Our knowledge of the impact of landscape fragmentation on gene flow patterns is mainly drawn from tropical and temperate ecosystems, where landscape features, such as the distance of a tree to the forest edge, drive connectivity and mating patterns. Yet, the structure of arid and semiarid plant communities – with open canopies and a scattered distr...

Anthropogenic‐driven perturbations such as agricultural intensification can affect simultaneously and distinctly several species groups and ecosystem functions. Unveiling these concurrent effects on interdependent species groups connected by different types of ecological interactions is a key challenge for ecologists. To this endeavour, hybrid ecol...

Ants are important pest control agents in many agroecosystems worldwide. However, little is known about how management, landscape complexity, their interaction, and the ecological contrast generated by different agricultural practices affect their communities and the potential pest control they can provide. Here, we surveyed ant communities in 40 p...

Pesticides used in agriculture to prevent yield and economic loss are a threat for the natural heritage worldwide. Finding win-win solutions for pest control management in sustainable and profitable agriculture is a current yet elusive challenge for human societies. The main alternative to reduce pest damage in a sustainable manner consists in fost...

Land-use conversion and habitat loss and degradation are among the factors affecting populations and species genetic integrity. Understanding how these factors govern the genetic structure of threatened plant populations is essential to design efficient conservation strategies. Here we analyze how environmental correlates, geographic location and a...

Interactions between established and recruiting plants play an important role in species coexistence in natural plant communities. However, our knowledge on the particular ecological drivers of these interactions is still limited. We use spatial point pattern analysis to study the spatial patterns of recruitment and infection in two plant-pathogen...

• The expansion of intensive agriculture has severely altered landscapes, a process that has been aggravated by the increase of greenhouse agriculture. However, few studies have considered the combined effects of habitat loss/degradation and greenhouse farming on insect visitors to native plants. • We analysed how habitat loss/degradation and green...

The identification of important nodes structuring pollination networks represents a key contribution to biodiversity conservation and pollination functioning. Understanding how species and their importance covary with management is essential if we aim to predict anthropic effects on the environment. In this study we used 96 bee trap nests to sample...

Ants are important pest control agents in many agroecosystems worldwide. However, little is known about how management, ecological contrast generated by different agricultural practices, and landscape complexity affect their communities and the potential pest control that they can provide. Here, we surveyed ant communities in 40 paired olive groves...

Interactions among organisms can be defined by two main features: a quantitative component (i.e. frequency of occurrence) and a qualitative component (i.e. success of the interaction). Measuring properly these two components at the community level, can provide a good estimate of the ecosystem functions mediated by biotic interactions. Although this...

Avian-mediated pest control is a significant ecosystem service with important economic implications. However, there is an overall paucity of experimental information about how landscape simplification affect its current level. Information on pest control by birds is missing in some permanent agroecosystems of worldwide importance, like olive orchar...

Avian-mediated pest control is a significant ecosystem service with important economic implications. However, there is an overall paucity of experimental information about how landscape simplification affect its current level. Information on pest control by birds is missing in some permanent agroecosystems of worldwide importance, like olive orchar...

Information on direct and indirect drivers of temporal variation in ant–plant interactions is scarce, compromising our ability to predict the functioning of these ecologically important interactions. We investigated the roles of precipitation, ant activity, abundance of young plant tissues bearing extrafloral nectaries (EFNs) and EFN phenotypes in...

Incluir el análisis de redes de interacción en estudios de ecología de comunidades puede aportar información más detallada, mecanicista y con potencial predictivo que los enfoques basados sólo en abundancia de individuos o riqueza de especies. El análisis de redes de interacción se ha extendido notablemente en la última década, sin embargo, aún so...

Land-use change agriculture intensification is one of the main causes for biodiversity loss at global scale. Factors as landscape complexity or management practices may modulate the impact of agriculture on biodiversity in agrosystems. The Andalusian olive grove is located in a hotspot of diversity and due to its arboreal nature, its ability to sus...

El proceso de intensificación agrícola (uso de fitosanitarios y fertilizantes y/o labranzas agresivas) junto a la simplificación del paisaje motivada por la conversión de áreas semi-naturales a zonas productivas están entre los principales responsables del fuerte declive de las aves agrarias. Para frenar este declive, la política agraria comunitari...

La alteración de los paisajes naturales y los cambios en el uso del suelo por agricultura y ganadería, son unos de los principales conductores del Cambio Global y de la pérdida de biodiversidad y de servicios ecosistémicos. En las últimas décadas la intensificación agrícola ha conducido, además, a una homogeneización y simplificación de los paisaje...

Understanding how multi‐scale environmental heterogeneity shapes the structure and functions of animal and plant communities is pivotal in agroecology. Our capacity to ensure the provision of ecosystem services (ES), the sustainability of agroecosystems and the efficiency of agri‐environmental schemes (AES) relies on this knowledge. There is growin...

One of the current challenges for applied ecologists is to understand how to manage/restore agroecosystems in a sustainable and cost‐effective way. The intermediate landscape complexity hypothesis (ILCH) predicts that the effectiveness of agri‐environmental measures (AES) on biodiversity and ecosystem services recovery is often largest in landscape...

Ecological network studies are providing important advances about the organization, stability and dynamics of ecological systems. However, the ecological networks approach is being integrated very slowly in plant community ecology, even though the first studies on plant facilitation networks were published more than a decade ago. The study of inter...

Studies assessing the effect of extensive versus intensive agricultural practices and addressing how biodiversity patterns and the effectiveness of agri-environmental practices (AES) to recover biodiversity are moderated by the landscape complexity (LMB framework), underlie large-scale biodiversity conservation programs and policies in anthropogeni...

Established plants can affect the recruitment of young plants, filtering out some and allowing the recruitment of others, with profound effects on plant community dynamics. Recruitment networks (RNs) depict which species recruit under which others. We investigated whether species abundance and phylogenetic distance explain the structure of RNs acro...

Bipartite ecological networks (BN) (e.g. plant-pollinator networks) are currently a powerful and widely used tool. Abundant literature explores how species interactions change along environmental gradients. However, some authors argue that BN might be simplistic and miss important information. Several studies discuss how including parasites and par...

Oilseed crops, including several mustards, are cultivated as biofuel sources worldwide. However, common mustard crops (e.g., the rapeseed Brassica napus) grow naturally in mesic temperate regions, which are expected to be impaired by global warming and increased aridity. In particular, increased aridity is predicted to reduce the oil concentration...

ID of the samples, geographical coordinates of the samples and presence/absence of the species involved in this work. (XLS)

Background and aims: Some polyploid species show enhanced physiological tolerance to drought compared with their progenitors. However, very few studies have examined the consistency of physiological drought response between genetically differentiated natural polyploid populations, which is key to evaluation of the importance of adaptive evolution...

Global change drivers are currently affecting semiarid ecosystems. Because these ecosystems differ from others in biotic and abiotic filters, cues for plant regeneration and management derived from elsewhere may not be applicable to semiarid ecosystems. We sought to determine the extent to which regional variation in regeneration prospects of a lon...

Interactions between established (canopy) and recruiting individuals (recruits) are pervasive in plant communities. Studies on recruitment in forests have mainly focused on negative density‐dependent conspecific interactions, while the outcomes of heterospecific canopy–recruit interactions have received much less attention and are generally assumed...

Southern European columbines (genus Aquilegia) are involved in active processes of diversification, and the Iberian Peninsula offers a privileged observatory to witness the process. Studies on Iberian columbines have provided significant advances on species diversification, but we still lack a complete perspective of the genetic diversification in...

The scale of disturbance is of paramount importance to understand the disruptive effect of anthropogenic perturbation on animal seed dispersal and its consequences for plant species conservation at regional level. However, the intricate ways by which landscape and local-scale disturbances affect seed dispersal remain unclear. We propose a conceptua...

It is well established that intransitively assembled interaction networks can support the coexistence of competing species, while transitively assembled (hierarchical) networks are prone to species loss through competitive exclusion. However, as the number of species grows, the complexity of ecological interaction networks grows disproportionately,...

Habitat loss and landscape degradation affect carnivorous mammal populations and the ecosystem services they provide, but these services are poorly assessed in semi-arid ecosystems. In the Ziziphus semiarid scrublands, a priority habitat for conservation in Europe, we investigated how red fox diet relates to habitat loss and landscape alteration. W...

A higher competitive advantage of polyploid plants compared with their parental diploids is frequently invoked to explain their establishment success, colonization of novel environments and cytotypic ecological segregation, yet there is scarce experimental evidence supporting such hypotheses. Here, we investigated whether differential competitive a...

• Premise of the study: Microsatellite primers were developed to characterize and evaluate patterns of genetic diversity and structure in the endangered Mediterranean shrub Ziziphus lotus (Rhamnaceae). • Methods and Results: Twenty microsatellite primers were developed for Z. lotus, of which 14 were polymorphic. We evaluated microsatellite polymor...

Aims Important aspects of plant community dynamics depend on interactions between plant species that affect the processes of recruitment and the replacement of dead individuals by new ones. These interactions blend in the replacement network of the community. The qualitative and functional structure of replacement networks can provide insights on c...

La pérdida y fragmentación de hábitat natural es una amenaza global para la biodiversidad. La dispersión de semillas, fundamental para la regeneración de las poblaciones, es gravemente afectada por la fragmentación de hábitat. Analizamos cuál es el efecto de la fragmentación sobre la dispersión y depredación de semillas de Ziziphus lotus, una espec...

248 re-establish the solute gradient across the membrane. By the contrast, Q. ilex, P. lentiscus and E. arborea were able to maintain low RD associated a high membrane resistance to dehydration (EL = 12.3±2.7 %, mean value). The results were confirmed by a significant (p < 0.05) correlation between RD and EL in C. incanus, E. multiflora and R. offi...

Habitat fragmentation, among others, threatens Ziziphus lotus persistence in the SE Iberian peninsula by the disruption of dispersal mutualism. In fact, few seeds achieve dispersal and this probably related to the general paucity of juveniles in these populations.

Habitat loss and landscape degradation affect animal-mediated seed dispersal, often collapsing the regeneration of endangered plant species and habitats in anthropogenic landscapes. We first compared the role of red fox and other vertebrates as seed disperser for the keystone scrub Ziziphus lotus. Because it turned out that foxes are the major Z. l...

The diversity–productivity relationship (humped‐back model ( HBM )) and the stress‐gradient ( SGH ) hypotheses may be connected when productivity is limited primarily by aridity. We analytically connect both hypotheses and assess the contribution of facilitation to woody plant richness along the aridity gradient of the Western Mediterranean florist...

Extra-floral nectaries (EFNs) are thought to represent protective adaptations against herbivory, but studies on the evolutionary ecology of EFNs have seldom been conducted. Here we investigate the patterns of natural selection and genetic variation in EFN traits in two wild populations of Anemopaegma album Mart. ex DC. (Bignoniaceae) that have been...

Differences in tolerance to water stress may underlie ecological divergence of closely-related ploidy lineages. However, the mechanistic basis of physiological variation governing eco-geographical cytotype segregation is not well understood. Here, using Brachypodium distachyon and its derived allotetraploid B. hybridum as model, we test the hypothe...

• We conducted environmental niche modeling (ENM) of the Brachypodium distachyon s.l. complex, a model group of two diploid annual grasses (B. distachyon, B. stacei) and their derived allotetraploid (B. hybridum), native to the circum-Mediterranean region. We (1) investigated the ENMs of the three species in their native range based on present and...

QuestionsWhen a tree or a shrub dies, the space it occupied can be overtaken by plants that were recruiting beneath it or colonized by new species. Such replacement processes can drive the temporal change in species abundance in a plant community. Can we predict the dynamics of a real plant community using observational data on plant–plant recruitm...

Herbivory is an ecological process that is known to generate different patterns of selection on defensive plant traits across populations. Studies on this topic could greatly benefit from the general framework of the Geographic Mosaic Theory of Coevolution (GMT). Here, we hypothesize that herbivory represents a strong pressure for extrafloral necta...

Aims: This study explores the patterns of niche differentiation in a group of 7 closely related columbines (Genus Aquilegia, Ranunculaceae) from the Iberian Peninsula. Populations of these columbines are subject to complex patterns of divergent selection across environments which partly explain the taxonomic structure of the group. This suggests th...

The effects of the present biodiversity crisis have been largely focused on the loss of species. However, a missed component of biodiversity loss that often accompanies or even precedes species disappearance is the extinction of ecological interactions. Here, we propose a novel model that (i) relates the diversity of both species and interactions a...

Advances in molecular biology, remote sensing, systems biology, bioinformatics, non-linear science, the physics of complex systems and other fields have rendered a great amount of data that remain to be integrated into models and theories that are capable of accounting for the complexity of ecological systems and the evolutionary dynamics of life....

Abstract Aims Phenotypic plasticity and local adaptation of populations at their distributional limits are crucial to understand species colonization and persistence in novel or marginal environments, as well as species divergence and niche width evolution. We assess the contribution of these processes to shape current elevational limits and determ...

The microevolutionary process of adaptive phenotypic differentiation of quantitative traits between populations or closely-related taxa depends on the response of populations to the action of natural selection. However, this response can be constrained by the structure of the matrix of additive genetic variance and covariance between traits in each...

Aims Experimental studies of the response to environmental variation of closely related taxa are needed to understand the mechanisms underlying phenotypic divergence, habitat segregation and range span within a radiating genus. We explored the magnitude of phenotypic differentiation and adaptive plasticity in relation to edaphic variation and its s...

During photosynthesis, respiration and transpiration, gas exchange occurs via the stomata and so plants face a trade-off between maximising photosynthesis while minimising transpiration (expressed as water use efficiency, WUE). The ability to cope with this trade-off and regulate photosynthetic rate and stomatal conductance may be related to niche...

Anthropogenic habitat alteration may affect the dispersal service provided by avian seed dispersers, ultimately causing regeneration collapse, through a decay in both the quantitative (seed removal) and qualitative (seed arrival to safe sites) components of seed dispersal effectiveness. However, despite its implications for management in real-world...

Glandular trichomes play a defensive role against herbivores in the leaves of many plant species. However, their functional role in inflorescences has not been studied, even though theory suggests that tissues with a higher fitness value, such as inflorescences, should be better defended. Using manipulative experiments, we analysed the defensive ro...

The differential adaptation of populations of the same species to their local environmental conditions through divergent selection, known as local adaptation, is a key step in the process of diversification of species. Here, we explore the local adaptation of the perennial mountain herb Helleborus foetidus to variable environmental conditions of se...

Much effort has been devoted to understanding the function of extrafloral nectaries (EFNs) for ant-plant-herbivore interactions. However, the pattern of evolution of such structures throughout the history of plant lineages remains unexplored. In this study, we used empirical knowledge on plant defences mediated by ants as a theoretical framework to...

Interaction networks are basic descriptions of ecological communities and are at the core of community dynamics models. Knowledge of their structure should enable us to understand dynamical properties of ecological communities. However, the relationships between dynamical properties of communities and qualitative descriptors of network structure re...

In myrmecochory, the relocation of diaspores to ant nests may lead to the enhancement of plant fitness because ant nests and their middens are often richer in essential nutrients than surrounding areas. This idea is the basis of the nutrient‐enrichment hypothesis (NEH), which suggests that nutrient enrichment may be a major selective influence in t...

In myrmecochory, the relocation of diaspores to ant nests may lead to the enhancement of plant fitness because ant nests and their middens are often richer in essential nutrients than surrounding areas. This idea is the basis of the nutrient-enrichment hypothesis (NEH), which suggests that nutrient enrichment may be a major selective influence in t...

• The ecological and adaptive significance of plant polyploidization is not well understood and no clear pattern of association between polyploid frequency and environment has emerged. Climatic factors are expected to predict cytotype distribution. However, the relationship among climate, cytotype distribution and variation of abiotic stress tolera...

Measuring heritable genetic variation is important for understanding patterns of trait evolution in wild populations, and yet studies of quantitative genetic parameters estimated directly in the field are limited by logistic constraints, such as the difficulties of inferring relatedness among individuals in the wild. Marker-based approaches have re...

Genus Aquilegia in North America has become a recurrent example of adaptive radiation driven by pollinator specialization and floral syndromes differentiation. However, Eurasian columbines show similar taxonomic diversity despite to be mainly pollinated by bumblebees. This situation makes Eurasian columbines an ideal counterpoint to explore diversi...

1. Frugivorous birds are a priority for conservation. They are experiencing the transformation of natural habitats to agro-ecosystems worldwide and some are taking advantage of agricultural production of fleshy-fruited plants. However, the mechanisms through which some birds are able to thrive in agricultural landscapes while others become extinct...

In view of the importance of facilitative interactions between plants, nurse-based planting has been proposed as a restoration technique for Mediterranean vegetation. However, facilitation efficiency is known to depend on the environmental context and the particular pair of interacting species. Understanding these context-and pair-specific dependen...