Biodiversity loss is one of the main challenges of our time,1,2 and attempts to address it require a clear un derstanding of how ecological communities respond to environmental change across time and space.3,4 While the increasing availability of global databases on ecological communities has advanced our knowledge of biodiversity sensitivity to environmental changes,5–7 vast areas of the tropics remain underst...
Made available in DSpace on 2020-12-12T01:28:32Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2020-12-01; Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES); Amazonian forests are extraordinarily diverse, but the estimated species richness is very much debated. Here, we apply an ensemble of parametric estimators and a novel technique that includes conspecific spatial aggregation to an exten...
Made available in DSpace on 2020-12-12T01:40:04Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2019-12-01; Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES); Tropical forests are known for their high diversity. Yet, forest patches do occur in the tropics where a single tree species is dominant. Such “monodominant” forests are known from all of the main tropical regions. For Amazonia, we sam...
Amazonian forests are extraordinarily diverse, but the estimated species richness is very much debated. Here, we apply an ensemble of parametric estimators and a novel technique that includes conspecific spatial aggregation to an extended database of forest plots with up-to-date taxonomy. We show that the species abundance distribution of Amazonia is best approximated by a logseries with aggregated individuals,...
Lineages tend to retain ecological characteristics of their ancestors through time. However, for some traits, selection during evolutionary history may have also played a role in determining trait values. To address the relative importance of these processes requires large-scale quantification of traits and evolutionary relationships among species. The Amazonian tree flora comprises a high diversity of angiospe...
Biodiversity loss from deforestation may be partly offset by the expansion of secondary forests and plantation forestry in the tropics. However, our current knowledge of the value of these habitats for biodiversity conservation is limited to very few taxa, and many studies are severely confounded by methodological shortcomings. We examined the conservation value of tropical primary, secondary, and plantation fo...
Six hectares, three in a primary forest and three in a 40 year old secondary forest were inventoried for all trees with Diameter at Breast Height (DNH) of 10 cm or greater in a terra firme forest 200 km north-east of Manaus, central Amazonia in order to compare the difference between structure, species richness and floristic composition. Both species richness and tree density were significantly higher in the up...
Estimates of extinction risk for Amazonian plant and animal species are rare and not often incorporated into land-use policy and conservation planning. We overlay spatial distribution models with historical and projected deforestation to show that at least 36% and up to 57% of all Amazonian tree species are likely to qualify as globally threatened under International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red ...
Studies in the tropics have shown that temporal patterns of tree flowering and fruiting in seasonally flooded forests can often be related to the variation in abiotic factors such as precipitation, temperature, and river-level fluctuations. In this study the flowering and fruiting phenology of Eschweilera parvifolia were analyzed in relation to two different flooding regions, in a black water floodplain forest ...
Species distribution models (SDMs) are widely used in ecology and conservation. Presence-only SDMs such as MaxEnt frequently use natural history collections (NHCs) as occurrence data, given their huge numbers and accessibility. NHCs are often spatially biased which may generate inaccuracies in SDMs. Here, we test how the distribution of NHCs and MaxEnt predictions relates to a spatial abundance model, based on ...