ORCID Profile
0000-0002-2842-4302
Current Organisations
University of Bristol
,
Universitat de Barcelona
,
University of Oxford
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Publisher: Wiley
Date: 20-06-2023
Abstract: Stage‐based demographic methods, such as matrix population models (MPMs), are powerful tools used to address a broad range of fundamental questions in ecology, evolutionary biology and conservation science. Accordingly, MPMs now exist for over 3000 species worldwide. These data are being digitised as an ongoing process and periodically released into two large open‐access online repositories: the COMPADRE Plant Matrix Database and the COMADRE Animal Matrix Database. During the last decade, data archiving and curation of COMPADRE and COMADRE, and subsequent comparative research, have revealed pronounced variation in how MPMs are parameterized and reported. Here, we summarise current issues related to the parameterisation and reporting of MPMs that arise most frequently and outline how they affect MPM construction, analysis, and interpretation. To quantify variation in how MPMs are reported, we present results from a survey identifying key aspects of MPMs that are frequently unreported in manuscripts. We then screen COMPADRE and COMADRE to quantify how often key pieces of information are omitted from manuscripts using MPMs. Over 80% of surveyed researchers ( n = 60) state a clear benefit to adopting more standardised methodologies for reporting MPMs. Furthermore, over 85% of the 300 MPMs assessed from COMPADRE and COMADRE omitted one or more elements that are key to their accurate interpretation. Based on these insights, we identify fundamental issues that can arise from MPM construction and communication and provide suggestions to improve clarity, reproducibility and future research utilising MPMs and their required metadata. To fortify reproducibility and empower researchers to take full advantage of their demographic data, we introduce a standardised protocol to present MPMs in publications. This standard is linked to www.compadre‐db.org , so that authors wishing to archive their MPMs can do so prior to submission of publications, following ex les from other open‐access repositories such as DRYAD, Figshare and Zenodo. Combining and standardising MPMs parameterized from populations around the globe and across the tree of life opens up powerful research opportunities in evolutionary biology, ecology and conservation research. However, this potential can only be fully realised by adopting standardised methods to ensure reproducibility.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 18-07-2022
DOI: 10.1111/GCB.16301
Abstract: Climate change is causing an increase in the frequency and intensity of marine heatwaves (MHWs) and mass mortality events (MMEs) of marine organisms are one of their main ecological impacts. Here, we show that during the 2015–2019 period, the Mediterranean Sea has experienced exceptional thermal conditions resulting in the onset of five consecutive years of widespread MMEs across the basin. These MMEs affected thousands of kilometers of coastline from the surface to 45 m, across a range of marine habitats and taxa (50 taxa across 8 phyla). Significant relationships were found between the incidence of MMEs and the heat exposure associated with MHWs observed both at the surface and across depths. Our findings reveal that the Mediterranean Sea is experiencing an acceleration of the ecological impacts of MHWs which poses an unprecedented threat to its ecosystems' health and functioning. Overall, we show that increasing the resolution of empirical observation is critical to enhancing our ability to more effectively understand and manage the consequences of climate change.
Publisher: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Date: 06-02-2022
DOI: 10.1101/2022.02.04.479091
Abstract: The interactive effects of multiple threats are one of the main causes of bio ersity loss, yet our understanding of what predisposes species to be impacted by multiple threats remains limited. Here we analyse a global dataset of over 7000 marine, freshwater, and terrestrial vertebrate populations, alongside trait, threat and geographical data, to identify the factors influencing the number of threats a species is subjected to at the population level. Out of a suite of predictors tested, we find that body mass and latitude both are broadly available for vertebrate species, and influence the number of threats a population is subjected to. Larger bodied species and those nearer the equator are typically affected by a higher number of threats. However, whilst this pattern broadly holds across ecosystems for most taxa, hibians and reptiles show opposing trends. We suggest that latitude and body mass should be considered as key predictors to identify which vertebrate populations are likely to be impacted by multiple threats. These general predictors can help to better understand the impacts of the Anthropocene on global vertebrate bio ersity and design effective conservation policies.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 21-06-2020
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 21-10-2022
DOI: 10.1111/ECOG.06309
Abstract: The interactive effects of multiple threats are one of the main causes of bio ersity loss, yet our understanding of what predisposes species to be impacted by multiple threats remains limited. Here we analyse a global dataset of over 7000 marine, freshwater and terrestrial vertebrate populations, alongside trait, threat and geographical data, to identify the factors influencing the number of threats a species is subjected to at the population level. Out of a suite of predictors tested, we find that body mass and latitude both are broadly available for vertebrate species and influence the number of threats a population is subjected to. Larger‐bodied species and those nearer the equator are typically affected by a higher number of threats. However, whilst this pattern broadly holds across ecosystems for most taxa, hibians and reptiles show opposing trends. We suggest that latitude and body mass should be considered as key predictors to identify which vertebrate populations are likely to be impacted by multiple threats. These general predictors can help to better understand the impacts of the Anthropocene on global vertebrate bio ersity and design effective conservation policies.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 25-03-2022
DOI: 10.1111/ELE.14004
Abstract: Accelerating rates of bio ersity loss underscore the need to understand how species achieve resilience—the ability to resist and recover from a/biotic disturbances. Yet, the factors determining the resilience of species remain poorly understood, due to disagreements on its definition and the lack of large‐scale analyses. Here, we investigate how the life history of 910 natural populations of animals and plants predicts their intrinsic ability to be resilient. We show that demographic resilience can be achieved through different combinations of compensation, resistance and recovery after a disturbance. We demonstrate that these resilience components are highly correlated with life history traits related to the species’ pace of life and reproductive strategy. Species with longer generation times require longer recovery times post‐disturbance, whilst those with greater reproductive capacity have greater resistance and compensation. Our findings highlight the key role of life history traits to understand species resilience, improving our ability to predict how natural populations cope with disturbance regimes.
Publisher: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Date: 10-09-2019
DOI: 10.1101/764464
Abstract: Aquatic and terrestrial realms display stark differences in key environmental factors and phylogenetic composition. Despite such differences, their consequences for the evolution of species’ life history strategies remain poorly understood. Here, we examine whether and how life history strategies vary between terrestrial and aquatic species. Global. Variable, the earliest year being in 1906 and the most recent in 2015. Macroscopic animals and plants species. We use demographic information for 638 terrestrial and 117 aquatic animal and plant species, to derive key life history traits capturing their population turnover, and investments in survival, development, and reproduction. We use phylogenetically corrected least squares regression to explore the differences in the trade-offs between life history traits in both realms. We then quantify the life history strategies of aquatic and terrestrial species using a phylogenetically corrected principal component analysis. We find that the same trade-offs structure terrestrial and aquatic life histories, resulting in two dominant axes of variation describing species’ pace- of-life and reproductive spread through time. Life history strategies differ between aquatic and terrestrial environments, with phylogenetic relationships playing a minor role. We show that adaptations of plants and animals to terrestrial environments have resulted in different life history strategies, particularly with their reproductive mode and longevity. Terrestrial plants display a great ersity of life history strategies, including the species with the longest lifespans. Aquatic animals, on the contrary, exhibit higher reproductive frequency than terrestrial animals, likely due to reproductive adaptations (i.e. internal fecundation) of the later to land. Our findings show that aquatic and terrestrial species are ruled by the same life history principles, but have evolved different strategies due to distinct selection pressures. Such contrasting life history strategies have important consequences for the conservation and management of aquatic and terrestrial species.
Publisher: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Date: 16-01-2023
DOI: 10.1101/2023.01.13.523871
Abstract: Stage-based demographic methods, such as matrix population models (MPMs), are powerful tools used to address a broad range of fundamental questions in ecology, evolutionary biology, and conservation science. Accordingly, MPMs now exist for over 3,000 species worldwide. These data are being digitised as an ongoing process and periodically released into two large open-access online repositories: the COMPADRE Plant Matrix Database and the COMADRE Animal Matrix Database. During the last decade, data archiving and curation of COMPADRE and COMADRE, and subsequent comparative research, have revealed pronounced variation in how MPMs are parameterized and reported. Here, we summarise current issues related to the parameterisation and reporting of MPMs that arise most frequently and outline how they affect MPM construction, analysis, and interpretation. To quantify variation in how MPMs are reported, we present results from a survey identifying key aspects of MPMs that are frequently unreported in manuscripts. We then screen COMPADRE and COMADRE to quantify how often key pieces of information are omitted from manuscripts using MPMs. Over 80% of surveyed researchers (n=60) state a clear benefit to adopting more standardised methodologies for reporting MPMs. Furthermore, over 85% of the 300 MPMs assessed from COMPADRE and COMADRE omitted one or more elements that are key to their accurate interpretation. Based on these insights, we identify fundamental issues that can arise from MPM construction and communication and provide suggestions to improve clarity, reproducibility, and future research utilising MPMs and their required metadata. To fortify reproducibility and empower researchers to take full advantage of their demographic data, we introduce a standardized protocol to present MPMs in publications. This standard is linked to www.compadre-db.org , so that authors wishing to archive their MPMs can do so prior to submission of publications, following ex les from other open-access repositories such as DRYAD, Figshare, and Zenodo. Combining and standardising MPMs parameterized from populations around the globe and across the tree of life opens up powerful research opportunities in evolutionary biology, ecology, and conservation research. However, this potential can only be fully realised by adopting standardised methods to ensure reproducibility.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 16-11-2021
DOI: 10.1111/ELE.13927
Abstract: Maintaining the resilience of natural populations, their ability to resist and recover from disturbance, is crucial to prevent bio ersity loss. However, the lack of appropriate data and quantitative tools has h ered our understanding of the factors determining resilience on a global scale. Here, we quantified the temporal trends of two key components of resilience—resistance and recovery—in population time‐series of vertebrate species globally. We show that the number of threats to which a population is exposed is the main driver of resilience decline in vertebrate populations. Such declines are driven by a non‐uniform loss of different components of resilience (i.e. resistance and recovery). Increased anthropogenic threats accelerating resilience loss through a decline in the recovery ability—but not resistance—of vertebrate populations. These findings suggest we may be underestimating the impacts of global change, highlighting the need to account for the multiple components of resilience in global bio ersity assessments.
Publisher: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Date: 10-2021
DOI: 10.1101/2021.09.29.462372
Abstract: Human activities are drastically reshaping Earth’s ecosystems. Across the tree of life, species become threatened and ultimately go extinct when they are unable to cope with these changes. Hence, understanding the resilience of natural populations is necessary to understand and predict species’ capacity to cope with increasing human pressures. Here, we use high-resolution demographic information for 921 populations of wild plants and animals to assess how they respond to increasing levels of human pressure. We show that fewer successful resilience strategies, allowing population to persist in disturb environments, exist in human-influenced habitats compared to pristine habitats. In contrast, pristine habitats host species with higher resistance and faster recovery than more altered environments. Importantly, the examined macroecologial patterns of demographic resilience are kingdom- and mobility-specific: natural populations of plants recover faster and have a propensity to grow faster after a disturbance ( i.e ., compensation) in urban areas than in pristine habitats, while these tendencies do not appear in animals. Likewise, populations of animals with limited mobility are less able to resist or compensate for disturbances in human altered environments than highly mobile populations. Our results suggest that human activities have eroded the ersity of natural populations’ resilience strategies. This finding implies that species will be less tolerant to disturbance in the future, as continuing bio ersity loss and increasing human impacts will ultimately shrink the spectrum of resilience strategies of organisms.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 02-05-2021
DOI: 10.1002/ECE3.7555
Abstract: Mutual reinforcement between abiotic and biotic factors can drive small populations into a catastrophic downward spiral to extinction—a process known as the “extinction vortex.” However, empirical studies investigating extinction dynamics in relation to species' traits have been lacking. We assembled a database of 35 vertebrate populations monitored to extirpation over a period of at least ten years, represented by 32 different species, including 25 birds, five mammals, and two reptiles. We supplemented these population time series with species‐specific mean adult body size to investigate whether this key intrinsic trait affects the dynamics of populations declining toward extinction. We performed three analyses to quantify the effects of adult body size on three characteristics of population dynamics: time to extinction, population growth rate, and residual variability in population growth rate. Our results provide support for the existence of extinction vortex dynamics in extirpated populations. We show that populations typically decline nonlinearly to extinction, while both the rate of population decline and variability in population growth rate increase as extinction is approached. Our results also suggest that smaller‐bodied species are particularly prone to the extinction vortex, with larger increases in rates of population decline and population growth rate variability when compared to larger‐bodied species. Our results reaffirm and extend our understanding of extinction dynamics in real‐life extirpated populations. In particular, we suggest that smaller‐bodied species may be at greater risk of rapid collapse to extinction than larger‐bodied species, and thus, management of smaller‐bodied species should focus on maintaining higher population abundances as a priority.
Publisher: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Date: 03-11-2022
DOI: 10.1101/2022.11.02.514877
Abstract: In the face of rapid global change and an uncertain fate for bio ersity, it is vital to quantify trends in wild populations. These trends are typically estimated from abundance time series for suites of species across large geographic and temporal scales. Such data implicitly contain phylogenetic, spatial, and temporal structure which, if not properly accounted for, may obscure the true magnitude and direction of bio ersity change. Here, using a novel statistical framework to simultaneously account for all three of these structures, we show that the majority of current abundance trends estimates among 10 high-profile datasets, representing millions of abundance observations, are likely unreliable or incorrect. Our new approach suggests that previous models are too simplistic, incorrectly estimating global abundance trends and often dramatically underestimating uncertainty, an aspect that is critical when translating global assessments into policy outcomes. Further, our approach also results in substantial improvements in abundance forecasting accuracy. Whilst our results do not improve the outlook for bio ersity, our framework does allow us to make more robust estimates of global wildlife abundance trends, which is critical for developing policy to protect our biosphere.
Publisher: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Date: 04-02-2020
DOI: 10.1101/2020.01.31.928721
Abstract: In times of global bio ersity crisis, developing tools to define, quantify, compare and predict ecological resilience is essential for understanding species’ responses to global change. Disparate interpretations of ecological resilience have, however, h ered the development of a common currency to quantify and compare resilience across natural systems. Most frameworks of study have focused on upper levels of biological organisation, especially ecosystems or communities, which adds layers of complication to measuring resilience with empirical data. To overcome such limitations, we suggest quantifying resilience using demographic data. Surprisingly, a quantifiable definition of resilience does not exist at the demographic level. Here, we present a framework of demographic resilience with a set of metrics that are comparable across species, and facilitate cost-effective management decisions.
Publisher: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Date: 07-2021
DOI: 10.1101/2021.06.30.450480
Abstract: Accelerating rates of bio ersity loss underscore the need to understand how species achieve resilience –their ability to resist and recover from a/biotic disturbances. Yet, the factors determining the resilience of species remain poorly understood, due to disagreements on its definition and the lack of large-scale analyses. Here, we investigate how the life history of 785 natural populations of animals and plants predict their intrinsic ability to be resilient. We show that demographic resilience can be achieved through different combinations of compensation, resistance, and recovery after a disturbance. We demonstrate that these resilience components are highly correlated with life history traits related to the species’ pace of life and reproductive strategy. Species with longer generation times require longer recovery times post-disturbance, while those with greater reproductive capacity have greater resistance and compensation. Our findings highlight the key role of life history traits to understand species resilience, improving our ability to predict how natural populations cope with disturbance regimes.
Location: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Location: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
No related grants have been discovered for Pol Capdevila.