Time for a double celebration in our group: recently, Eugenia Vázquez Novoa defended her PhD thesis on the effects of goat grazing on forest biodiversity and resilience, and even more recently, María Pascual Tudanca defended her PhD thesis on the ecological impacts of managed honeybees. Congratulations both!

Eugenia explored the response of an arid forest community to different intensities to goat grazing. She worked in four livestock settlements in Telteca Forest Reserve, north-eastern Mendoza Province, Argentina, where we established paired permanent plots near and far from the settlements. Her results indicate that grazing intensity influences plant community structure, for example leading to decreased taxonomic, phylogenetic, and functional diversity at high grazing intensities. Based on her results, Eugenia advocates an integrated, sustainable management approach that includes livestock rotation to curb grazing intensity.

In turn, María studied the impact of managed honeybee hives on plants, pollinators, and their interactions in the Villavicencio Nature Reserve, Mendoza, Argentina. Working at paired sites close to and far from managed honeybee hives, she found that managed hives have positive effect on the reproduction of a self-compatible plant species and negative effects on the reproduction of the two self-incompatible species. Honeybees also led to decreased pollen dispersal distance, which may affect its male reproductive success. She also observed that managed honeybee hives caused a shift in the pollen used by solitarty bees in their nests, as well as increased nest abundance in some of the species studied. Finally, managed hives altered plant-pollinator interactions through species composition and increased the specialization of wood-nesting bees. Her results lead to several conservation and management recommendations regarding the interannual rotation of hive locations, the number of hives per site, and the need to monitor native plant and pollinators. If you want to know more about María’s research, check out her papers here, here, and here. Also, in this video she tells a bit more about her research.

¡Felicitaciones Euge y María!