ECOLOGICAL INTERACTIONS AS MANAGEMENT INDICATORS IN PROTECTED NATURAL AREAS.

 

Abstract: This project addresses the management of protected natural areas (ANPs) from the domain of interspecific plant-animal interactions. ANPs of different countries using a similar methodology, will allow the extraction of the common of communities with different histories and belonging to different biogeographic regions. The study consists of investigating the effects of human intervention on the biodiversity of ANPs from a perspective of loss of mutual interactions (e.g., pollination, seed dispersal, facilitation) and antagonists (e.g., herbivory, competition, parasitism, seed predation). The analyzes will be carried out from a local to landscape scale. Once the information from interactions, spatial and phylogenetic analyses will be carried out with the purpose of identify the areas with the highest diversity of species, interactions and phylogenetic diversity. Once the three components have been mapped, an analysis of congruence will be performed that will allow to identify, on the one hand, the regions of the most sensitive ANPs anthropic intervention, and on the other hand, the most sensitive components that determine the loss of biodiversity.