Institut Botànic de Barcelona

Fungal frontiers for sustainability: unlocking the hidden kingdom

Fungi have repeatedly delivered transformative advances across industries, from medicine to food to materials, yet these breakthroughs have emerged from a narrow base of organisms and well-studied systems. Although mycology has taken a big leap forward in the past decades because...

SIESTR: a novel method to analyze Species’ Introductions Effects in Space and Time on Range dynamics

Rapidly shifting climates will lead to species range shifts over the next century. Artificially introducing species in new locations to enhance species migration, termed assisted migration (AM), has been suggested as one possible strategy to avoid species extinction. While curren...

Evaluating three alternative scenarios for the origin of a disjunct Arctium tomentosum population in the Pyrenees

Background Disjunctions in species distributions offer natural experiments for investigating the mechanisms underlying distributional breaks, such as range contraction, long-distance pollen transport, or long-distance seed dispersal. Here, we document and characterise a floristic...

Hidden genomic structure and widespread structural polymorphism across environmental gradients in the spiny sea star Marthasterias glacialis

Abstract Genomic regions of reduced recombination can preserve linkage among co-adapted alleles, facilitating local adaptation despite high connectivity. Such regions—often generated by chromosomal inversions—may be especially important in highly dispersive marine taxa yet remain...

Widespread thermophilization but weak link to climate warming in Europe’s summit plant communities

Abstract Recent changes in alpine vegetation are often attributed to climate warming, particularly community composition shifts towards more warmth-associated species, or thermophilization. Here we assess the link between thermophilization and warming across 53 European mountain...