Abstract:
Quantifying general patterns of community structure, and the mechanisms behind them, is key to understand the persistence and collapse of complex ecological communities. As such, this understanding is fundamental to developing sound conservation strategies that consider the processes involved in community formation and persistence. To achieve this, we should develop holistic approaches that not only consider species composition but also ecological interactions between them. In my lab, we tackle this challenge by unveiling empirical patterns of species interactions networks alongside theoretical approaches that enable a better understanding of their assembly and disassembly.
In this talk, I will discuss different approaches that we have developed over the last few years to better understand community assembly and dynamics across spatial scales and across ecosystems: from microbes to vertebrates. I will illustrate these perspectives with examples from the marine realm, where we have investigated the drivers of species interaction networks along latitudinal gradients, the synergistic effects of invasions and warming species interactions and distributions, and the mechanistic drivers of host-associated marine microbial communities, with applications to conservation. Our findings illustrate how the analysis of large datasets of species distributions and interactions, linked with mechanistic modelling frameworks of complex communities can offer rich perspectives to unveil the mechanisms behind the assembly of complex communities. This synergistic interaction between empirical analysis and theoretical modelling can form the basis for sound conservation strategies.

Bio:
Miguel is a computational ecologist interested in understanding the assembly and disassembly of complex species interactions networks across scales and ecosystems. He obtained his PhD in Terrestrial Ecology from the Autonomous University of Barcelona in 2014. He developed his doctoral research jointly at the Marine Sciences Institute (ICM-CSIC) and the Centre for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications (CREAF). After his PhD, Miguel completed his postdoctoral training at the University of Adelaide, Australia (2014-2016) and the Theoretical and Experimental Ecology Station of the CNRS, France (2016-2019). He has worked in topics ranging from the organisation of the microbiome to the spatial variation and assembly of ecological networks across scales and their response to environmental change. Since 2019 he leads the Computational Ecology Lab at Swansea University, UK where he is an Associate Professor.
His research seeks to understand the ecological and evolutionary drivers behind the structuring of complex species interaction networks. Further, he is interested in applying this knowledge to understand the impacts of different aspects of global change on ecosystems. To tackle these challenges, he studies a variety of systems at various scales, from microbial communities to continent-wide food webs. His research combines analyses of complex datasets of species distributions and interactions with the development of theoretical models of community assembly incorporating ecological and evolutionary processes. This approach ultimately seeks to contribute to the mechanistic understanding of large-scale biodiversity patterns and how they break in the face of environmental perturbations.