Biology subjects

Resco de Dios, V.

Publications and source records attributed to Resco de Dios, V..

5 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Record-breaking wildfire intensity and nocturnal spread during the extreme 2025 wildfire season in Southwestern Europe: causes and impacts

Southwestern Europe faced an extreme wildfire season in 2025, with nearly 700,000 hectares burned in the Iberian Peninsula (IP) alone. Here, we analyze the drivers and impacts of the 2025 wildfire season in the IP and its significance within the ongoing global pyrocrisis. Decades-long declines in burned area, driven by increased fire suppression, ceased after an inflection point in 2022. Fire intensity has escalated over the last two decades, and the energy emitted in 2025 approached that produced annually by a 1,000MW nuclear reactor. Despite a historically wet spring, an extreme summer heatwave triggered a flash drought, dehydrating fuels below critical thresholds. Remarkably, 29-42% of all wildfires spread faster at night than during the day, a seldom-reported phenomenon likely arising from interactions between surface weather, atmospheric instability, and pyroconvective processes. Global change-induced increases in fire intensity facilitated the overwhelming of suppression efforts during simultaneous fire events that may have been manageable decades ago. Fire activity expanded into previously fire-free high-altitude regions, and there was a marked change in fire-size distributions, with the largest wildfire in record and the largest proportion of burned area by megafires (those burning over 5,000ha). Impacts included over 2,000 premature deaths from smoke exposure and significant effects on protected areas. These results indicate shifts in key components of anthropogenic fire regimes, including unprecedented nocturnal fire acceleration and increased burned area and fire intensity, with escalating impacts on human health and ecosystems.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2025

Protected areas show substantial and increasing risk of wildfire globally

Protected area coverage is set to expand in response to climate change and the biodiversity crisis, but we lack assessments of wildfire incidence in protected areas. Here we quantify bigeographical variation in global patterns of burned area in protected areas. During the twenty-first century, wildfires have burned 2 billion hectares of protected areas - an area the size of Russia and India combined - and, while protected areas only cover 19.2% of semi-natural ecosystems, they concentrate 28.5% of the area burned annually. Wildfire in protected areas increased significantly between 2001-2024 (+0.46% yr-1), even after taking into account increases in protected area (+0.27% yr-1), pointing to a disproportional impact of fire on protected areas under increasingly severe fire weather. This pattern showed marked variation across biomes, with the largest disproportionate increases occurring in fire-prone biomes (e.g. Mediterranean and dry tropical forests, tropical grasslands and xeric shrublands). There were important exceptions to this general trend, and protected area fire was lower than expected in biomes where fire activity is naturally limited by moisture (e.g. tropical rainforests or montane grasslands). Wildfires are important for the health of many ecosystems, and such values of burned area will not always mean a negative outcome. Amidst concerted efforts to expand protected area coverage such as the Global Biodiversity Framework, our results highlight the need for new management strategies that address the globally increasing impacts of burned area across protected areas under unabated climate change.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2022

Disentangling leaf structural and material properties in relation to their anatomical and chemical compositional traits in oaks (Quercus L.)

The existence of sclerophyllous plants has been considered an adaptive strategy against different environmental stresses. As it literally means "hard-leaved", it is essential to quantify the leaf mechanical properties to understand sclerophylly. However, the relative importance of each leaf trait on mechanical properties is not yet well established. The genus Quercus is an excellent system to shed light on this since it minimizes phylogenetic variation while having a wide variation in sclerophylly. Thus, leaf anatomical traits and cell wall composition were measured, analyzing their relationship with LMA and leaf mechanical properties in a set of 25 oak species. Outer wall contributed strongly to leaf mechanical strength. Moreover, cellulose plays a critical role in increasing leaf strength and toughness. The PCA plot based on leaf trait values clearly separated Quercus species into two groups corresponding to evergreen and deciduous species. Sclerophyllous Quercus species are tougher and stronger due to their thicker epidermis outer wall and/or higher cellulose concentration. Furthermore, section Ilex species share common traits regardless of they occupy quite different climates. In addition, evergreen species living in Mediterranean-type climates share common leaf traits irrespective of their different phylogenetic origin.

plant biology↗

bioRxiv2022

Drivers and implications of the extreme 2022 wildfire season in Southwest Europe

Wildfire is a common phenomenon in Mediterranean countries but the 2022 fire season has been extreme in southwest Europe (Portugal, Spain and France). Burned area has exceeded the 2001-2021 median by a factor of 52 in some regions and large wildfires started to occur in June-July, earlier than the traditional fire season. These anomalies were associated with record-breaking values of fuel dryness, atmospheric water demand and pyrometeorological conditions. For instance, live fuel moisture content was below the historical minima for almost 50% of the season in some regions. Wildfire impacts are primarily social and economical in these fire-prone landscapes, but they may prompt large-scale degradation if this anomaly becomes more common under climate change, as is expected. As climate changes intensify, we can expect this to become the new normal in large parts of the continent. Climate change is already here and delaying fuel management will only worsen the wildfire problem. Here we provide a preliminary though comprehensive analysis of 2022s wildfire season in southwest Europe (Portugal, France and Spain).

ecology↗

bioRxiv2017

Does circadian regulation lead to optimal gas exchange regulation?

Optimal stomatal theory is an evolutionary model proposing that leaves trade-off Carbon (C) for water to maximise C assimilation (A) and minimise transpiration (E), thereby generating a marginal water cost of carbon gain ({lambda}) that remains constant over short temporal scales. The circadian clock is a molecular timer of metabolism that controls A and stomatal conductance (gs), amongst other processes, in a broad array of plant species. Here, we test whether circadian regulation contributes towards achieving optimal stomatal behaviour. We subjected bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) and cotton (Gossypium hirsutum) canopies to fixed, continuous environmental conditions of photosynthetically active radiation, temperature and vapour pressure deficit over 48 hours. We observed a significant and self-sustained circadian oscillation in A and in stomatal conductance (gs) which also led to a circadian oscillation in{lambda} . The lack of constant marginal water cost indicates that circadian regulation does not directly lead to optimal stomatal behaviour. However, the temporal pattern in gas exchange, indicative of either maximizing A or of minimizing E, depending upon time of day, indicates that circadian regulation could contribute towards optimizing stomatal responses. More broadly, our results add to the emerging field of plant circadian ecology and show that molecular controls may partially explain leaf-level patterns observed in the field.

ecology↗