Encounters between flowers and invertebrates are key events for the functioning of tropical forests. Assessing the structure of networks composed of the interactions between those partners leads to a better understanding of ecosystem functioning and the effects of environmental factors on ecological processes. Gathering such data is, however, costly and time-consuming, especially in the highly diverse tropics.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBiodiversity conservation is a challenge for today. Studies regarding different ecosystems have become extremely important for understanding communities and promoting strategies for conservation, especially those involving forest restoration as strategy to reverse biodiversity loss. We compared bee diversity indices between three remnants of Atlantic rainforest in southern Brazil and four adjacent areas that were reforested after shale mining, and which are now under different restoration levels.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFZookeys
December 2020
A new species of the small carpenter bee, genus Ceratina (Ceratinula) Moure, from the Cerrado Biome in midwestern Brazil is described and illustrated. Ceratina (Ceratinula) fioreseana Oliveira, is easily distinguished from its congeners by the size of the facial maculations and the honey-yellow color of the legs and antennal scape, which distinguish it especially from Ceratina (Ceratinula) manni Cockerell, 1912, the most similar species in terms of facial maculation patterns. The geographic records of , here interpreted as endemic to the semiarid Caatinga region in northeastern Brazil, are presented, with new records for the Brazilian states of Piauí, Ceará and Bahia.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Sci Food Agric
April 2021
Background: Natural environments within agricultural landscapes have been recognized as reservoirs of biodiversity and, therefore, providers of fundamental ecosystem services to human beings. Bees are the main providers of pollination and thus contribute to the production of food consumed worldwide. In this work, we evaluated the distribution of bees in an agricultural landscape of coffee plantation before and after coffee flowering.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF