Multiple habitats drive the functional diversity of fish assemblages in a tropical estuary.

Understanding estuarine diversity patterns is crucial to highlight the ecological value of coastal ecosystems for fish assemblages. To increase our knowledge, we investigated the functional diversity of fish assemblages in five estuarine habitats (sandy beaches, mudflats, seagrass meadows, mangrove fringes, and estuarine riparian vegetation) in a tropical estuary of Brazil. Functional diversity metrics were assessed considering seven fish functional traits and calculated using functional indices, PCoA (functional spaces), and community-weighted mean (CWM).

Climate-associated variation in the drivers of benthic macroinvertebrate species-area relationships across shallow freshwater lakes.

The island species-area relationship (ISAR) describes how species richness increases with increasing area of a given island or island-like habitat, such as freshwater lakes. While the ISAR is one of the most common phenomena observed in ecology, there is variation in both the form of the relationship and its underlying mechanisms. We compiled a global data set of benthic macroinvertebrates from 524 shallow freshwater lakes, ranging from 1 to 293,300 ha in area.

Performance of richness estimators for invertebrate inventories in reservoirs.

Biological inventories combined with the estimation of species richness represent a useful tool for the analysis of the pattern of species distribution in different regions. This study aimed to (i) comparatively evaluate the performance of non-parametric richness estimators for invertebrate inventories in reservoirs between ecoregions and (ii) to assess whether the efficiency (bias, precision and accuracy indices) of the estimators is altered when applied to sites from different ecoregions. The study was conducted in the ecoregions Central Pediplano of the Borborema Plateau (Paraíba River basin) and Northern Sertaneja Depression (Piranhas-Assu River basin), semiarid region of Brazil.