Research lines

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1) Global changes impact on biodiversity, ecosystem function, and resilience

Increasing knowledge on how environmental changes, among other drivers of global change, impact on biodiversity, ecosystem function, and resilience can help us moving towards a more sustainable future. My main contributions to this field are:

• Studing the impacts of agricultural intensification via irrigation on ecological communities, notably farmland bird and insect species

• Investigating how landscape fragmentation affects ecosystem function and resilience, specially of plant communities.

• Examining the recovery of communities after long-term human impacts (namely, agriculture, livestock grazing and forestry), and the effect of management type on community recovery.

• Understanding the effect of management type and land-use intensification on ecosystem services.

 

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2) Conservation biology of threatened species

The ecology of threatened species needs to be developed further to improve strategies to  conserve these species. Some of my contributions to this field are:

• Understanding the effects of habitat heterogeneity on the ecological requirements of the Lesser kestrel during the premigratory period, an unknown season at that moment, at multiple spatial scales.

• Investigating the impact of environmental changes on the Cantabric capercaillie in an atypical biogeographical region.

• Developing a quick, accurate genetic method to sex the Bearded vulture to improve the conservation efforts using the captive-bird breeding programs.

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If you have any question or you would like to collaborate with me, please send me an email to adefrutost[at]gmail.com or leave a message here: contact.