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Jordi Bascompte

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Jordi Bascompte
Born (1967-05-20) 20 May 1967 (age 57)
Alma materUniversity of Barcelona
(PhD and Master)
Employer(s)University of Zurich
Spanish Research Council
National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis
University of California, Irvine
Known forMutualistic networks
Architecture of biodiversity
Metapopulations dynamics
Websitebascompte.net

Jordi Bascompte (born in Olot on 20 May 1967) is a professor of ecology at the University of Zurich and the director of its specialized master's program on quantitative environmental sciences.[1] He is best known for having brought the interactions of mutual benefit between plants and animals into community ecology, at the time largely dominated by predation and competition. His application of network theory to the study of mutualism has identified general laws that determine the way in which species interactions shape biodiversity.

Early life and education

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Jordi Bascompte was born in Olot, a small city in the province of Girona, Spain, characterized by its volcanic scenery. He grew up in Barcelona and become a keen bird watcher at a relatively young age, mainly due to the influence of a series of TV documentaries by the Spanish Naturalist Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente. Later on, he became acquainted with the work of the late ecologist Ramon Margalef, with whom he had a long-lasting interaction during his PhD studies at the University of Barcelona. Margalef ended up becoming his single most important scientific influence. Other scientists who had a strong influence on his work were developmental biologist Pere Alberch (who together with Margalef served in his PhD committee) and Nobel Prize winner Ilya Prigogine, whom he met at a summer school organized by the Universidad Complutense de Madrid.[2]

Career and research work

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Bascompte's research combines theory and the analysis of large data sets to address basic and applied problems in ecology. During the early stages of his research, he studied the spatial dimension of population and community dynamics. This provided novel approximations to attempt to answer unresolved questions in conservation biology such as how much habitat can be destroyed before a metapopulation is driven regionally extinct, or how many patches are necessary for the persistence of a metapopulation.[3][4]

Right after moving to Sevilla, his research shifted to the study of structure and dynamics of ecological networks. Bascompte applied network theory to the study of mutually beneficial interactions such as those between plants and their pollinators or seed dispersers, which provided a quantitative framework to address mutualism at the community level. The first stage of this research, was aimed at describing the structure of these networks. Together with Pedro Jordano and Jens Olesen, Bascompte showed that mutualistic networks display repeated structural patterns.[5] This finding helped dismissing the somehow naïve assumption that mutualism has to lead to either highly specialized pairwise interactions or diffuse assemblages intractable to analysis. The immediate question was what ecological and environmental implications may these patterns have. Answering this question was hampered by the lack of a theoretical framework such as the one existing for competition or predation.

Bascompte joined forces with a group of theoretical physicists to build an analytical framework based on the concept of structural stability to assess the consequences of network structure for species coexistence and community robustness. These results showed that the architecture of mutualistic networks maximizes the number of coexisting species by increasing the relative role of facilitation over competition and that it increases the range of variability these communities can cope with before one or more species is driven extinct. These results led to thinking about mutualistic networks in terms of the architecture of biodiversity. Because many communities have already started losing species, however, it is not only important to know the range of perturbations these mutualistic networks can tolerate before start losing species, but also what is the rate of network collapse once extinctions start taking place.[6][7]

Ironically, the very same interactions of mutual benefit that have contributed to the generation of such high values of biodiversity may fasten the rate at which such biodiversity is eroded. Specifically, species extinctions can lead to coextinction cascades -- groups of related species disappearing as a consequence of the extinction of species they depend on. Bascompte and colleagues showed that incorporating species interactions into climate change models not only increases the pool of species predicted to be driven extinct; it also changes the way extant species are selected from the evolutionary and functional trees, with potential implications for the functioning and robustness of the resulting communities.[8]

In the last few years, Bascompte and his postdoc Rodrigo Cámara-Leret have used this network approach to map the knowledge that indigenous communities have about the services provided by surrounding plants and how this knowledge is shared among different languages.[9] This work has shown that a large fraction of medicinal knowledge is unique to a single language and that those languages with unique medicinal knowledge are among the most endangered ones, which may compromise humanity's capacity for medicinal discovery.

Books

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  • Self-Organization in Complex Ecosystems (with R. V. Solé)[10]
  • Mutualistic Networks (with P. Jordano)[11]
  • Evolución y Complejidad (with Bartolo Luque)
  • Modeling Spatiotemporal Dynamics in Ecology (with R.V. Solé)

Awards and honors

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References

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  1. ^ "Specialised Master's Study Program in Quantitative Environmental Sciences". University of Zurich.
  2. ^ Sprugel, Doug. "Jordi Bascompte – Historical Records Committee". Ecological Society of America.
  3. ^ Bascompte, Jordi; Sole, Ricard V. (1996). "Habitat Fragmentation and Extinction Thresholds in Spatially Explicit Models". Journal of Animal Ecology. 65 (4): 465–473. doi:10.2307/5781. ISSN 0021-8790. JSTOR 5781.
  4. ^ Bascompte, Jordi; Possingham, Hugh; Roughgarden, Joan (2002-02-01). "Patchy Populations in Stochastic Environments: Critical Number of Patches for Persistence". The American Naturalist. 159 (2): 128–137. doi:10.1086/324793. hdl:10261/41721. ISSN 0003-0147. PMID 18707409. S2CID 9007180.
  5. ^ Bascompte, Jordi; Jordano, Pedro; Melián, Carlos J.; Olesen, Jens M. (2003-08-05). "The nested assembly of plant–animal mutualistic networks". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 100 (16): 9383–9387. Bibcode:2003PNAS..100.9383B. doi:10.1073/pnas.1633576100. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 170927. PMID 12881488.
  6. ^ Bastolla, Ugo; Fortuna, Miguel A.; Pascual-García, Alberto; Ferrera, Antonio; Luque, Bartolo; Bascompte, Jordi (April 2009). "The architecture of mutualistic networks minimizes competition and increases biodiversity". Nature. 458 (7241): 1018–1020. Bibcode:2009Natur.458.1018B. doi:10.1038/nature07950. ISSN 1476-4687. PMID 19396144. S2CID 4395634.
  7. ^ Rohr, Rudolf P.; Saavedra, Serguei; Bascompte, Jordi (2014-07-25). "On the structural stability of mutualistic systems". Science. 345 (6195). doi:10.1126/science.1253497. hdl:10261/102341. PMID 25061214. S2CID 206557096.
  8. ^ Bascompte, Jordi; García, María B.; Ortega, Raúl; Rezende, Enrico L.; Pironon, Samuel (May 2019). "Mutualistic interactions reshuffle the effects of climate change on plants across the tree of life". Science Advances. 5 (5): eaav2539. Bibcode:2019SciA....5.2539B. doi:10.1126/sciadv.aav2539. PMC 6520021. PMID 31106269.
  9. ^ Cámara-Leret, Rodrigo; Bascompte, Jordi (2021-06-15). "Language extinction triggers the loss of unique medicinal knowledge". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 118 (24). Bibcode:2021PNAS..11803683C. doi:10.1073/pnas.2103683118. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 8214696. PMID 34103398.
  10. ^ Koppel, Johan van de (2008). "Review of: Self-organization in Complex Ecosystems". Mathematical Biosciences. 212: 109–110. doi:10.1016/j.mbs.2007.12.001.
  11. ^ Dáttilo, Wesley (1 March 2015). "Mutualistic networks by Jordi Bascompte and Pedro Jordano". Journal of Complex Networks. 3 (1): 158. doi:10.1093/comnet/cnu021. ISSN 2051-1310.
  12. ^ "George Mercer Award – Historical Records Committee". Ecological Society of America.
  13. ^ "30 años - Premios Rei Jaume" (PDF). Fundación PRJI.
  14. ^ "BES Marsh Book Award Winner 2016". British Ecological Society. 11 November 2016.
  15. ^ "The ecologist Jordi Bascompte, Premi Ramon Margalef d'Ecologia 2021". Ministry of the Presidency.