Publications by authors named "Blas M Benito"

Potato () is considered one of the most widely consumed crops worldwide, due to its high yield and nutritional profile, climate change-related environmental threats and increasing food demand. This scenario highlights the need of sustainable agricultural practices to enhance potato productivity, while preserving and maintaining soil health. Plant growth-promoting bacteria (PGPB) stimulate crop production through biofertilization mechanisms with low environmental impact.

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Fairy circles (FCs) are regular vegetation patterns found in drylands of Namibia and Western Australia. It is virtually unknown whether they are also present in other regions of the world and which environmental factors determine their distribution. We conducted a global systematic survey and found FC-like vegetation patterns in 263 sites from 15 countries and three continents, including the Sahel, Madagascar, and Middle-West Asia.

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Drylands cover ~41% of the terrestrial surface. In these water-limited ecosystems, soil moisture contributes to multiple hydrological processes and is a crucial determinant of the activity and performance of above- and belowground organisms and of the ecosystem processes that rely on them. Thus, an accurate characterisation of the temporal dynamics of soil moisture is critical to improve our understanding of how dryland ecosystems function and are responding to ongoing climate change.

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Despite their extent and socio-ecological importance, a comprehensive biogeographical synthesis of drylands is lacking. Here we synthesize the biogeography of key organisms (vascular and nonvascular vegetation and soil microorganisms), attributes (functional traits, spatial patterns, plant-plant and plant-soil interactions) and processes (productivity and land cover) across global drylands. These areas have a long evolutionary history, are centers of diversification for many plant lineages and include important plant diversity hotspots.

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In this letter we present comments on the article "A global-scale ecological niche model to predict SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus" by Coro published in 2020.

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Article Synopsis
  • Late-spring frosts (LSFs) significantly impact plant and animal performance in temperate and boreal regions, yet their geographic distribution and evolutionary effects remain largely unclear.
  • An analysis from 1959 to 2017 assesses LSFs and tree species' resistance strategies, revealing that areas with frequent LSFs have tree species that adapt by leafing out later, while regions where LSFs were rare show species that leaf out quickly.
  • The study predicts that as LSF occurrences rise in formerly unaffected areas like Europe and Asia, about 35% and 26% of their temperate forest areas will face increased frost damage, respectively, compared to only 10% in North America, highlighting the need for informed
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Studying demographic history of species provides insight into how the past has shaped the current levels of overall biodiversity and genetic composition of species, but also how these species may react to future perturbations. Here we investigated the demographic history of the willow grouse (), rock ptarmigan (), and black grouse () through the Late Pleistocene using two complementary methods and whole genome data. Species distribution modeling (SDM) allowed us to estimate the total range size during the Last Interglacial (LIG) and Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) as well as to indicate potential population subdivisions.

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Intuitively, interannual spring temperature variability (STV) should influence the leaf-out strategies of temperate zone woody species, with high winter chilling requirements in species from regions where spring warming varies greatly among years. We tested this hypothesis using experiments in 215 species and leaf-out monitoring in 1585 species from East Asia (EA), Europe (EU) and North America (NA). The results reveal that species from regions with high STV indeed have higher winter chilling requirements, and, when grown under the same conditions, leaf out later than related species from regions with lower STV.

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