Benítez López Ana

Investigación

I am an ecologist with broad interests in spatial ecology, macroecology, biodiversity conservation and global change biology. My main scientific achievements include incorporating complex meta-analytical and predictive models to study the effect of global change drivers on species distribution and abundance patterns across large scales. To this end, I collate and synthesize existing wealth of ecological data from the scientific literature, and combine it with remote-sensing products, trait databases, and phylogenetic trees to better understand the mechanisms, interactions and impacts of global change drivers on ecological communities and ecosystem functioning. I also employ field-based technologies (e.g. camera traps, acoustic monitoring, and GPS trackers) to address pressing questions in community, population and movement ecology, and inform local-scale conservation of threatened steppe bird species.

A large part of my research aims at understanding species distributions and abundance patterns at several scales, from microhabitats, to home ranges and geographic ranges, using biogeographical, macroecological, and evolutionary principles. These include investigating the relative role of abiotic factors, biotic interactions and anthropogenic drivers on shaping species distributions and species abundance, elucidating mechanisms of species coexistence, and assessing macroecological patterns of trait variation along environmental clines, and under selective pressures in insular environments. I am also involved in extinction risk research via the development of tools that can assist IUCN Red List assessments (sRedList). Further, my research has contributed to strengthen the scientific underpinning of the model GLOBIO, which is routinely used to inform global and regional biodiversity assessments (e.g. IPBES).