Research Interests:
Ants, an ecologically successful and numerically dominant group of animals, play key ecological roles as soil engineers, predators, nutrient recyclers, and regulators of plant growth and reproduction in most terrestrial ecosystems.... more
Ants, an ecologically successful and numerically dominant group of animals, play key ecological roles as soil engineers, predators, nutrient recyclers, and regulators of plant growth and reproduction in most terrestrial ecosystems. Further, ants are widely used as bioindicators of the ecological impact of land use. We gathered information of ant species in the Atlantic Forest of South America. The ATLANTIC ANTS data set, which is part of the ATLANTIC SERIES data papers, is a compilation of ant records from collections (18,713 records), unpublished data (29,651 records), and published sources (106,910 records; 1,059 references), including papers, theses, dissertations, and book chapters published from 1886 to 2020. In total, the data set contains 153,818 ant records from 7,636 study locations in the Atlantic Forest, representing 10 subfamilies, 99 genera, 1,114 ant species identified with updated taxonomic certainty, and 2,235 morphospecies codes. Our data set reflects the heterogene...
Research Interests:
Ant assemblages have been used as bioindicators of the response of biodiversity to different types of anthropogenic disturbances. However, usual diversity metrics (e.g., ant species richness and composition) sometimes seem fair limited to... more
Ant assemblages have been used as bioindicators of the response of biodiversity to different types of anthropogenic disturbances. However, usual diversity metrics (e.g., ant species richness and composition) sometimes seem fair limited to show a general panorama of human impacts. Thus, we verified habitat-use ant guilds as a complementary predictable parameter, based on the ant fauna reported to thirteen forest fragments and pastures in southwestern Brazilian Amazon. Specifically, we hypothesized that forest specialist, open-habitat specialist, and generalist ants would present distinct responses to forest-pasture shifting. We expected that the forest-pasture shifting promotes a decrease in the species richness of forest specialists and an increase in open-habitat specialists, while the generalists would have few changes in their richness because they can live in both habitats. As expected, the species richness of forest specialist ants decreased, and open-habitat ants increased wit...
Figure 1. Areas with ant records in the state of Piauí, Brazil, based on literature review (black circles) and collecting expeditions of the present study to the Serra das Confusões (red circle) and Serra da Capivara (blue circle)... more
Figure 1. Areas with ant records in the state of Piauí, Brazil, based on literature review (black circles) and collecting expeditions of the present study to the Serra das Confusões (red circle) and Serra da Capivara (blue circle) National Parks.
Piauí, a Brazilian Northeast state, has been considered one of the most important regions for the presence of new taxa in ants globally, especially considering the ecosystems’ diversity formed by the transition of the three biomes in the... more
Piauí, a Brazilian Northeast state, has been considered one of the most important regions for the presence of new taxa in ants globally, especially considering the ecosystems’ diversity formed by the transition of the three biomes in the state, the Cerrado, Caatinga and the Atlantic Forest. Despite the recent increase in studies of ant diversity in the Neotropical region, Piauí still represents a major knowledge gap regarding its ant fauna. Therefore, this study aimed to increase the knowledge about the ant fauna of the state by generating a list of species with data obtained from the literature, online repositories and collection expeditions to the Serra da Capivara and Serra das Confusões National Parks. A total of 152 species in 52 genera and nine subfamilies were registered from 24 localities in Piauí. Fifty-eight out the 152 species recorded represent new records for the state, eight are new records for the Brazilian Northeast Region, and one consists of a new record for the co...