Research line: Ecological interactions and maintenance of biodiversity
This research line examines how biotic interactions across multiple scales—from molecular and within‑individual processes to populations and complex communities—shape the stability, functioning, and evolution of ecosystems, with a strong empirical and theoretical focus on Doñana and other Mediterranean landscapes, as well as in tropical areas. We focus on plant–animal–microbe interactions, including pollination, seed dispersal, herbivory, host–parasite and host–pathogen dynamics, intra‑guild predation, conspecific interactions, and plant–plant and animal–animal competition and facilitation.
At the community scale, we analyse assembly and coevolutionary processes, the structure of complex interaction networks and food webs, and how defaunation, habitat change, and species invasions drive interaction loss, rewiring, cascading effects, and the resilience of interaction assemblages. At the population scale, we quantify dispersal processes, seed and pollen flow, and reproductive success as explicit outcomes of interactions, using effectiveness frameworks (e.g. seed dispersal and resource provisioning effectiveness) that integrate quantitative and qualitative components, as well as links between pathogen load, body condition, and fitness. At the individual and within‑individual scales, we study intra‑specific interactions in social organisms, patterns of phenotypic variability, among‑individual variation in resource use and interaction outcomes, movement ecology, and epigenetic signatures associated with long‑term variation in interaction regimes.
Our study systems encompass higher plants; arthropods, birds, amphibians, and mammals; fungi and yeasts; and microbiome pathogens and other host–symbiont systems. Methodologically, we combine network theory and other theoretical models with detailed fieldwork, molecular genetics and epigenetics, omics tools, chemical and microbiological analyses, and large‑scale automatic sampling at individual and community levels. We generate multi‑method, open datasets on interaction networks (e.g., wild bee–flower and plant–frugivore interaction networks in Doñana) to enable long‑term monitoring and comparative analyses. Future challenges include quantifying cascading effects and keystone interactions, improving assessments of network resilience, leveraging historical records, and applying next‑generation omics and high‑throughput sampling to interaction biodiversity monitoring.
