José Alexandre Felizola Diniz Filho

The aim of this work was to design priority areas for conservation in the Cerrado region, Brazil, based on Emberizidae (Aves) diversity. We analyzed the overlap of complementarity networks of areas in the biome needed to represent all the species of the group (irreplaceability), as well as an optimal minimum area network that minimizes socioeconomic cost throughout the region. To identify any possible influence of the species that had a small dimension of occurrence in Cerrado and concern others ecoregions (i.e., that do not have high proportion of ranges within the Cerrado), we performed all the analyses with the total number of species breeding in the Cerrado and also excluding those that are marginally distributed in the biome. The minimum number of the areas selected to build the networks decayed from 6 to 5 cells, when the peripheral ones were excluded. Our results showed that endemic and peripheral species influenced the priorities areas for conservation, we concluded that, al...

Aim: Studying species richness patterns by considering all species as equivalent units may prevent a deeper understanding of the origin and maintenance of biodiversity. Here, we deconstructed the species richness of Neotropical lianas by specific attributes of species to study richness–environment relationships. Location: Neotropics Taxon: Tribe Bignonieae (Bignoniaceae), the largest clade of Neotropical lianas Methods: We used five morphological, one geographical and two evolutionary attributes of species, each with 2–7 attribute states. We compared the environmental response of species richness of each attribute state to the response of overall Bignonieae species richness. For those groups of species that differed in their environmental response to three-dimensional habitat structure, climate, and soil we assessed: (i) the magnitude and direction of the environmental response; and (ii) the variation in species richness explained by environmental variables and spatial filters using...

Climate change and species invasions interact in nature, disrupting biological communities. Based on this knowledge, we simultaneously assessed the effects of climate change on the native distribution of the Amazonian fish Colossoma macropomum as well as on its invasiveness across river basins of South America, using ecological niche modeling. We used six niche models within the ensemble forecast context to predict the geographical distribution of C. macropomum for the present time, 2050 and 2080. Given that this species has been continuously introduced into non-native South American basins by fish farming activities, we added the locations of C. macropomum farms into the modeling process to obtain a more realistic scenario of its invasive potential. Based on modelling outputs we mapped climate refuge areas at different times. Our results showed that a plenty of climatically suitable areas for the occurrence of C. macropomum occurrence are located outside the original basins at the ...

Summary In recent years, changes have been detected in the climatic niches of several non‐native species. In spite of this, and although Ecological Niche Models (ENMs) assume species show climatic niche conservatism, most studies still use ENM to assess the risks of invasion by alien species. In this study, we tested how niche expansion of the pond slider (Trachemys scripta) differs in invaded continents and how the performance of ENMs is affected by different niche shift scenarios. We described niche equivalence (whether native and invaded niches are identical), unfilling (native niche not present in invasive niche), expansion (invasive niche not present in native niche) and stability, based on the pond slider native and invaded occurrence points. We created an ENM using a Maxent method, based on the native occurrences of this turtle, and evaluated the model's performance using invasive records. Our results indicate that the pond slider niche changed when new areas that were ei...

ABSTRACT Most large reserves in Brazil do not hold viable populations of jaguars to guarantee the species’ long-term survival. Corridors linking populations have been identified as a potential tool to avoid negative effects of isolation, increasing population viability. Here, we performed a Brazil-wide evaluation of potential large scale corridors connecting protected jaguar populations. Six variables (human population size, dam reservoir size, number of dams, roads, railways and cities) expected to negatively impact jaguar movement were analyzed across 180 potential corridors connecting 298 protected jaguar areas. We established overall disturbance scores for the corridors using a principal components analysis and compared them among the Brazilian biomes. We further investigated which variables separated biomes using a canonical variates analysis. The Atlantic Forest and the semi-arid Caatinga have the most impacted potential corridors, whereas the Amazon and Pantanal still have the best potential corridors. Corridor quality in the Cerrado grasslands was intermediate. All variables but human population size and corridor length contributed significantly to differences in corridor variables among biomes. Our conclusions suggest that we need to plan the implementation of large scale corridors in the Amazon, Pantanal and particularly the Cerrado soon, while potential corridors might still be economically viable. In the much more impacted Atlantic Forest and Caatinga, the need for conservation actions is strongest, but logistical difficulties and costs may turn implementation of corridors unfeasible.

Uma das maiores ameaças à diversidade biológica é a perda de hábitat, de modo que uma das alternativas para proteção da biodiversidade é a seleção de reservas pela utilização de procedimentos de otimização para estabelecer áreas prioritárias para conservação. Neste estudo, um algoritmo simulated annealing foi usado para verificar como a periferia das distribuições das espécies influencia na seleção de áreas no Cerrado para conservação de 131 espécies de anfíbios anuros. Dois conjuntos de dados foram analisados, um contendo a distribuição original das espécies e outro excluindo a periferia das distribuições. As redes ótimas encontradas a partir das distribuições originais contiveram 17 quadrículas enquanto aquelas encontradas a partir das distribuições restritas foram maiores, com 22 células. As células com alto grau de insubstituibilidade foram mantidas em todas as redes e novas regiões de células substituíveis, localizadas na margem do bioma, surgiram quando apenas as distribuições...

ABSTRACTA criticism of macroecological studies has been their extensive use of secondary data sources. In this note we evaluate how different data sources affect macroecological patterns for the parrots of South America. We mapped extents of parrot occurrence based on four sources of range maps. We compared basic statistics for geographical range size distribution (mean, variance and skew) and calculated correlations between geographical range size estimates and grid cell species richness estimates. Finally, results from multiple regression analyses of species richness against six environmental variables were also compared. We found that patterns were very robust to the data source, with only relatively slight quantitative differences. Our results reinforce the notion that patterns emerging from macroecological analyses are robust to variations in data sources and cannot be merely artefacts resulting from low data quality, notably poorly defined mapping and conflicting taxonomy.

SAM (Spatial Analysis in Macroecology) is a freeware application that offers a comprehensive array of spatial statistical methods, focused primarily on surface pattern spatial analysis. SAM is a compact, but powerful stand‐alone software, with a user‐friendly, menu‐driven graphical interface. The methods available in SAM are the most commonly used in macroecology and geographical ecology, and range from simple tools for exploratory graphical analysis (e.g. mapping and graphing) and descriptive statistics of spatial patterns (e.g. autocorrelation metrics), to advanced spatial regression models (e.g. autoregression and eigenvector filtering). Download of the software, along with the user manual, can be downloaded online at the SAM website: (permanent URL at ).

Aim  To test the prediction that environmental suitability derived from species distribution modelling (SDM) could be a surrogate for jaguar local population density estimates.Location  Americas.Methods  We used 1409 occurrence records of jaguars to model the distribution of the species using 11 SDM methods. We tested whether models’ suitability is linearly correlated with jaguar population densities estimated from 37 different locations. We evaluated whether the relationship between density and suitability forms a constraint envelope, in which higher densities are found mainly in regions with high suitability, whereas low densities can occur in regions with variable suitability. We tested this using heteroscedasticity test and quantile regressions.Results  A positive linear relationship between suitability and jaguar density was found only for four methods [bioclimatic envelope (BIOCLIM), genetic algorithm for rule set production (GARP), maximum entropy (Maxent) and generalized boo...

The statistical study of biological shape and shape changes (morphometrics, as defined by Bookstein 1991) has benefited greatly from the substitution of regular sums of squares by squared Procrustes chord distances in general linear models. Squared Procrustes chord distances are summed squared differences between corresponding landmarks from two objects after removal of effects due to scale, position, and orientation (from now on, referred to as Procrustes distances for shortness). Goodall (1991) proposed a multiple group ...