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About me

My scientific interest focuses on the description of biodiversity patterns, the delimitation of the processes that generate them, the realization of models capable of predicting the niche and geographic distribution of organisms, the selection of reserves, the effects of global change and the drawbacks and possibilities of the available information on biodiversity. A large part of my research is devoted to study the Iberian-Balearic region and the coleoptera of the Scarabaeoidea superfamily, although I have worked with different groups of organisms and in different regions of the world.

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CITATIONS

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DATA

Year 2023

355

Published articles

H Index

16310

WoS Citations

Directed theses(Last 10 years)

ONGOING PROJECTS

Projects that are currently being carried out

Entomological data bank from Castilla-La Mancha: compilation, data quality analysis and conservation use.

Multi-scale effect of livestock veterinary compounds on the diversity and health status of dung beetles: from the individual level to the environmental scale.

Thermoregulation, acclimation and thermal responses of dung beetles to spatio-temporal changes in temperature

Comparative effects of climate and land use changes on the spatial distribution of a group of indicator insects (Coleoptera: Scarabaeinae) in the Atlantic Forest.

News

The so-called species distribution models aim to estimate the geographic location of the species under future climatic scenarios. However, these predictions assume that the climatic conditions of the localities currently inhabited by the species reflect their "niche" and that, in addition, a causal relationship can be established using this information. Recognizing that it is difficult to know how species will respond to climate change, we present an alternative proposal based on spaces instead of species. The goal is to find where the areas with climatic and edaphic conditions similar to those of a given protected area (emitter areas) are located, and where the areas that in the future will have the conditions of that territory (recipient areas).

Soon in Animal Biodiversity and Conservation.

Understanding the evolutionary history of a group is a challenge that requires multiple lines of evidence, but also to assume that the natural laws and processes that currently operate also operated in the past. Using paleontological information, paleo-climatic simulations, phylogenetic analysis and climatic niche inferences based on current data, we have studied the evolutionary response of the Clusiaceae family of plants (about 1,900 species) to the environmental changes occurred since Late Cretaceous (approximately 100 million years ago). The obtained results suggest that not all the groups that currently inhabit non-tropical regions are recently originated. Some contemporary groups were already pre-adapted to the temperate-cold conditions appeared during Late Eocene (34 million years ago).
Soon in Global Ecology and Biogeography.

The exoskeleton of insects and, specifically, those of Coleoptera could be useful to handle different types of radiation and, therefore, to assist passively in thermoregulation. We have studied the elytral reflectance, transmittance and absorbance of five species of dung beetles of the genus Canthon. We observe that the most energetic radiations with the shortest wavelength are absorbed almost completely by the elytra, while the infrared radiation can pass through it easily. This general pattern of response is slightly different in the only analysed species that is able to live indistinctly both in wooded and open areas, suggesting a possible origin or environmental significance of the management of different types of radiation by the elytra.

Soon in Photochemistry and Photobiology.