Jordi Bascompte

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Jordi Bascompte
Born (1967-05-20) 20 May 1967 (age 55)
Olot (Spain)
Alma mater University of Barcelona
(PhD and Master)
Employer(s) University of Zurich
Spanish Research Council
National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis
University of California, Irvine
Known forMutualistic networks
Architecture of biodiversity
Metapopulations dynamics
Website bascompte.net

Jordi Bascompte (born in Olot on 20 May 1967) is a professor of ecology at the University of Zurich and the director of its specialized master's program on quantitative environmental sciences. [1] He is best known for having brought the interactions of mutual benefit between plants and animals into community ecology, at the time largely dominated by predation and competition. His application of network theory to the study of mutualism has identified general laws that determine the way in which species interactions shape biodiversity.

Contents

Early life and education

Jordi Bascompte was born in Olot, a small city in the province of Girona, Spain, characterized by its volcanic scenery. He grew up in Barcelona and become a keen bird watcher at a relatively young age, mainly due to the influence of a series of TV documentaries by the Spanish Naturalist Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente. Later on, he became acquainted with the work of the late ecologist Ramon Margalef, with whom he had a long-lasting interaction during his PhD studies at the University of Barcelona. Margalef ended up becoming his single most important scientific influence. Other scientists who had a strong influence on his work were developmental biologist Pere Alberch (who together with Margalef served in his PhD committee) and Nobel Prize winner Ilya Prigogine, whom he met at a summer school organized by the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. [2]

Career and research work

Bascompte's research combines theory and the analysis of large data sets to address basic and applied problems in ecology. During the early stages of his research, he studied the spatial dimension of population and community dynamics. This provided novel approximations to attempt to answer unresolved questions in conservation biology such as how much habitat can be destroyed before a metapopulation is driven regionally extinct, or how many patches are necessary for the persistence of a metapopulation. [3] [4]

Right after moving to Sevilla, his research shifted to the study of structure and dynamics of ecological networks. Bascompte applied network theory to the study of mutually beneficial interactions such as those between plants and their pollinators or seed dispersers, which provided a quantitative framework to address mutualism at the community level. The first stage of this research, was aimed at describing the structure of these networks. Together with Pedro Jordano and Jens Olesen, Bascompte showed that mutualistic networks display repeated structural patterns. [5] This finding helped dismissing the somehow naïve assumption that mutualism has to lead to either highly specialized pairwise interactions or diffuse assemblages intractable to analysis. The immediate question was what ecological and environmental implications may these patterns have. Answering this question was hampered by the lack of a theoretical framework such as the one existing for competition or predation.

Bascompte joined forces with a group of theoretical physicists to build an analytical framework based on the concept of structural stability to assess the consequences of network structure for species coexistence and community robustness. These results showed that the architecture of mutualistic networks maximizes the number of coexisting species by increasing the relative role of facilitation over competition and that it increases the range of variability these communities can cope with before one or more species is driven extinct. These results led to thinking about mutualistic networks in terms of the architecture of biodiversity. Because many communities have already started losing species, however, it is not only important to know the range of perturbations these mutualistic networks can tolerate before start losing species, but also what is the rate of network collapse once extinctions start taking place. [6] [7]

Ironically, the very same interactions of mutual benefit that have contributed to the generation of such high values of biodiversity may fasten the rate at which such biodiversity is eroded. Specifically, species extinctions can lead to coextinction cascades -- groups of related species disappearing as a consequence of the extinction of species they depend on. Bascompte and colleagues showed that incorporating species interactions into climate change models not only increases the pool of species predicted to be driven extinct; it also changes the way extant species are selected from the evolutionary and functional trees, with potential implications for the functioning and robustness of the resulting communities. [8]

In the last few years, Bascompte and his postdoc Rodrigo Cámara-Leret have used this network approach to map the knowledge that indigenous communities have about the services provided by surrounding plants and how this knowledge is shared among different languages. [9] This work has shown that a large fraction of medicinal knowledge is unique to a single language and that those languages with unique medicinal knowledge are among the most endangered ones, which may compromise humanity's capacity for medicinal discovery.

Books

Awards and honors

Related Research Articles

A complex system is a system composed of many components which may interact with each other. Examples of complex systems are Earth's global climate, organisms, the human brain, infrastructure such as power grid, transportation or communication systems, complex software and electronic systems, social and economic organizations, an ecosystem, a living cell, and ultimately the entire universe.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mutualism (biology)</span> Mutually beneficial interaction between species

Mutualism describes the ecological interaction between two or more species where each species has a net benefit. Mutualism is a common type of ecological interaction. Prominent examples include most vascular plants engaged in mutualistic interactions with mycorrhizae, flowering plants being pollinated by animals, vascular plants being dispersed by animals, and corals with zooxanthellae, among many others. Mutualism can be contrasted with interspecific competition, in which each species experiences reduced fitness, and exploitation, or parasitism, in which one species benefits at the expense of the other.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pollinator</span> Animal that moves pollen from the male anther of a flower to the female stigma

A pollinator is an animal that moves pollen from the male anther of a flower to the female stigma of a flower. This helps to bring about fertilization of the ovules in the flower by the male gametes from the pollen grains.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Food web</span> Natural interconnection of food chains

A food web is the natural interconnection of food chains and a graphical representation of what-eats-what in an ecological community. Another name for food web is consumer-resource system. Ecologists can broadly lump all life forms into one of two categories called trophic levels: 1) the autotrophs, and 2) the heterotrophs. To maintain their bodies, grow, develop, and to reproduce, autotrophs produce organic matter from inorganic substances, including both minerals and gases such as carbon dioxide. These chemical reactions require energy, which mainly comes from the Sun and largely by photosynthesis, although a very small amount comes from bioelectrogenesis in wetlands, and mineral electron donors in hydrothermal vents and hot springs. These trophic levels are not binary, but form a gradient that includes complete autotrophs, which obtain their sole source of carbon from the atmosphere, mixotrophs, which are autotrophic organisms that partially obtain organic matter from sources other than the atmosphere, and complete heterotrophs that must feed to obtain organic matter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Human ecology</span> Study of the relationship between humans and their natural, social, and built environments

Human ecology is an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary study of the relationship between humans and their natural, social, and built environments. The philosophy and study of human ecology has a diffuse history with advancements in ecology, geography, sociology, psychology, anthropology, zoology, epidemiology, public health, and home economics, among others.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Conservation biology</span> Study of threats to biological diversity

Conservation biology is the study of the conservation of nature and of Earth's biodiversity with the aim of protecting species, their habitats, and ecosystems from excessive rates of extinction and the erosion of biotic interactions. It is an interdisciplinary subject drawing on natural and social sciences, and the practice of natural resource management.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Habitat fragmentation</span> Discontinuities in an organisms environment causing population fragmentation.

Habitat fragmentation describes the emergence of discontinuities (fragmentation) in an organism's preferred environment (habitat), causing population fragmentation and ecosystem decay. Causes of habitat fragmentation include geological processes that slowly alter the layout of the physical environment, and human activity such as land conversion, which can alter the environment much faster and causes the extinction of many species. More specifically, habitat fragmentation is a process by which large and contiguous habitats get divided into smaller, isolated patches of habitats.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Metapopulation</span> Group of separated yet interacting ecological populations

A metapopulation consists of a group of spatially separated populations of the same species which interact at some level. The term metapopulation was coined by Richard Levins in 1969 to describe a model of population dynamics of insect pests in agricultural fields, but the idea has been most broadly applied to species in naturally or artificially fragmented habitats. In Levins' own words, it consists of "a population of populations".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ilkka Hanski</span> Finnish ecologist

Ilkka Aulis Hanski was a Finnish ecologist at the University of Helsinki, Finland. The Metapopulation Research Center led by Hanski, until his death, has been nominated as a Center of Excellence by the Academy of Finland. The group studies species living in fragmented landscapes and attempts to advance metapopulation ecology research. Metapopulation ecology itself studies populations of plants and animals which are separated in space by occupying patches.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">G. David Tilman</span> American ecologist (born 1949)

George David Tilman, ForMemRS, is an American ecologist. He is Regents Professor and McKnight Presidential Chair in Ecology at the University of Minnesota, as well as an instructor in Conservation Biology; Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior; and Microbial Ecology. He is director of the Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve long-term ecological research station. Tilman is also a professor at University of California, Santa Barbara's Bren School of Environmental Science & Management.

The Ramon Margalef Prize in Ecology is a prize awarded annually by the Generalitat de Catalunya to recognize an exceptional scientific career or discovery in the field of ecology or other environmental sciences. The award was created to honor the life and work of Ramon Margalef. The award has been presented every year since 2004 and comes with an honorarium of €80,000 and a sculpture representing a microalga, called Picarola margalefii. It is open to ecologists from anywhere in the world.

An ecological network is a representation of the biotic interactions in an ecosystem, in which species (nodes) are connected by pairwise interactions (links). These interactions can be trophic or symbiotic. Ecological networks are used to describe and compare the structures of real ecosystems, while network models are used to investigate the effects of network structure on properties such as ecosystem stability.

In ecology, extinction debt is the future extinction of species due to events in the past. The phrases dead clade walking and survival without recovery express the same idea.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Evolving digital ecological network</span>

Evolving digital ecological networks are webs of interacting, self-replicating, and evolving computer programs that experience the same major ecological interactions as biological organisms. Despite being computational, these programs evolve quickly in an open-ended way, and starting from only one or two ancestral organisms, the formation of ecological networks can be observed in real-time by tracking interactions between the constantly evolving organism phenotypes. These phenotypes may be defined by combinations of logical computations that digital organisms perform and by expressed behaviors that have evolved. The types and outcomes of interactions between phenotypes are determined by task overlap for logic-defined phenotypes and by responses to encounters in the case of behavioral phenotypes. Biologists use these evolving networks to study active and fundamental topics within evolutionary ecology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pollination network</span>

A pollination network is a bipartite mutualistic network in which plants and pollinators are the nodes, and the pollination interactions form the links between these nodes. The pollination network is bipartite as interactions only exist between two distinct, non-overlapping sets of species, but not within the set: a pollinator can never be pollinated, unlike in a predator-prey network where a predator can be depredated. A pollination network is two-modal, i.e., it includes only links connecting plant and animal communities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Biodiversity loss</span> Extinction of species and local ecosystem loss reduction or loss of species in a given habitat

Biodiversity loss includes the worldwide extinction of different species, as well as the local reduction or loss of species in a certain habitat, resulting in a loss of biological diversity. The latter phenomenon can be temporary or permanent, depending on whether the environmental degradation that leads to the loss is reversible through ecological restoration/ecological resilience or effectively permanent. The current global extinction, has resulted in a biodiversity crisis being driven by human activities which push beyond the planetary boundaries and so far has proven irreversible.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pedro Jordano</span>

Pedro Diego Jordano Barbudo is an ecologist, conservationist, researcher, focused on evolutionary ecology and ecological interactions. He is an honorary professor and associate professor at University of Sevilla, Spain. Most of his fieldwork is done in Parque Natural de las Sierras de Cazorla, Segura y Las Villas, in the eastern side of Andalucia, and in Doñana National Park, where he holds the title of Research Professor for the Estación Biológica Doñana, Spanish Council for Scientific Research (CSIC). Since 2000 he has been actively doing research in Brazil, with fieldwork in the SE Atlantic rainforest.

Anna Traveset is a Spanish ecologist, particularly known for her work on ecological interactions between plants and animals, especially on islands.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Metabarcoding</span> Genetic technique for identifying organisms in mixed samples

Metabarcoding is the barcoding of DNA/RNA in a manner that allows for the simultaneous identification of many taxa within the same sample. The main difference between barcoding and metabarcoding is that metabarcoding does not focus on one specific organism, but instead aims to determine species composition within a sample.

Jennifer Dunne is an American ecologist whose research focuses on the network structure of food webs. One of 14 scientists who led critical advances in food web research over the last century, according to the journal Food Webs, Dunne uses ecological network research to compare the varying ways humans interact with other species through space and time, providing a quantitative perspective on sustainability of socio-ecological systems.

References

  1. ↑ "Specialised Master's Study Program in Quantitative Environmental Sciences". University of Zurich.
  2. ↑ Sprugel, Doug. "Jordi Bascompte – Historical Records Committee". Ecological Society of America.
  3. ↑ Bascompte, Jordi; Sole, Ricard V. (1996). "Habitat Fragmentation and Extinction Thresholds in Spatially Explicit Models". Journal of Animal Ecology. 65 (4): 465–473. doi:10.2307/5781. ISSN   0021-8790. JSTOR   5781.
  4. ↑ Bascompte, Jordi; Possingham, Hugh; Roughgarden, Joan (2002-02-01). "Patchy Populations in Stochastic Environments: Critical Number of Patches for Persistence". The American Naturalist. 159 (2): 128–137. doi:10.1086/324793. hdl:10261/41721. ISSN   0003-0147. PMID   18707409. S2CID   9007180.
  5. ↑ Bascompte, Jordi; Jordano, Pedro; Melián, Carlos J.; Olesen, Jens M. (2003-08-05). "The nested assembly of plant–animal mutualistic networks". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 100 (16): 9383–9387. Bibcode:2003PNAS..100.9383B. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1633576100 . ISSN   0027-8424. PMC   170927 . PMID   12881488.
  6. ↑ Bastolla, Ugo; Fortuna, Miguel A.; Pascual-García, Alberto; Ferrera, Antonio; Luque, Bartolo; Bascompte, Jordi (April 2009). "The architecture of mutualistic networks minimizes competition and increases biodiversity". Nature. 458 (7241): 1018–1020. Bibcode:2009Natur.458.1018B. doi:10.1038/nature07950. ISSN   1476-4687. PMID   19396144. S2CID   4395634.
  7. ↑ Rohr, Rudolf P.; Saavedra, Serguei; Bascompte, Jordi (2014-07-25). "On the structural stability of mutualistic systems". Science. 345 (6195). doi:10.1126/science.1253497. hdl:10261/102341. PMID   25061214. S2CID   206557096.
  8. ↑ Bascompte, Jordi; García, María B.; Ortega, Raúl; Rezende, Enrico L.; Pironon, Samuel (May 2019). "Mutualistic interactions reshuffle the effects of climate change on plants across the tree of life". Science Advances. 5 (5): eaav2539. Bibcode:2019SciA....5.2539B. doi:10.1126/sciadv.aav2539. PMC   6520021 . PMID   31106269.
  9. ↑ Cámara-Leret, Rodrigo; Bascompte, Jordi (2021-06-15). "Language extinction triggers the loss of unique medicinal knowledge". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 118 (24). Bibcode:2021PNAS..11803683C. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2103683118 . ISSN   0027-8424. PMC   8214696 . PMID   34103398.
  10. ↑ Koppel, Johan van de (2008). "Review of: Self-organization in Complex Ecosystems". Mathematical Biosciences. 212: 109–110. doi:10.1016/j.mbs.2007.12.001.
  11. ↑ Dáttilo, Wesley (1 March 2015). "Mutualistic networks by Jordi Bascompte and Pedro Jordano". Journal of Complex Networks. 3 (1): 158. doi:10.1093/comnet/cnu021. ISSN   2051-1310.
  12. ↑ "George Mercer Award – Historical Records Committee". Ecological Society of America.
  13. ↑ "30 años - Premios Rei Jaume" (PDF). Fundación PRJI.
  14. ↑ "BES Marsh Book Award Winner 2016". British Ecological Society. 11 November 2016.
  15. ↑ "The ecologist Jordi Bascompte, Premi Ramon Margalef d'Ecologia 2021". Ministry of the Presidency.
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