Pervasive gaps in Amazonian ecological research.

Biodiversity loss is one of the main challenges of our time, and attempts to address it require a clear understanding of how ecological communities respond to environmental change across time and space. While the increasing availability of global databases on ecological communities has advanced our knowledge of biodiversity sensitivity to environmental changes, vast areas of the tropics remain understudied. In the American tropics, Amazonia stands out as the world's most diverse rainforest and the primary source of Neotropical biodiversity, but it remains among the least known forests in America and is often underrepresented in biodiversity databases.

Testing the context dependence of ant nutrient preference across habitat strata and trophic levels in Neotropical biomes.

Animals are integrated into the wider ecosystem via their foraging and behavior. The compensation hypothesis predicts that animals target their foraging efforts (i) toward nutrients that are scarce in the environment and (ii) toward nutrients that are not present in the usual diet of species, which varies across trophic levels. Understanding how foraging for resources varies locally, such as across habitat strata, and trophic levels will help to elucidate the links between the local environment and communities to the ecological functions that animals mediate.

Diaspore Removal by Ants Does Not Reflect the Same Patterns of Ant Assemblages in Mining and Rehabilitation Areas.

Mining is responsible for drastic ecosystem changes and rehabilitation is used to promote the return of functions after these impacts. In this scenario, we investigated the responses of ant assemblages and diaspore removal by ants to the transformations caused by mining and rehabilitation predicting that (a) the increase in plant density (a proxy for mining intensity) led to an increase in ant richness, percentage of diaspores removed, and changes in species composition that in turn are correlated with changes in environmental variables; (b) the increase in vegetation structure (a proxy for rehabilitation ages) led to an increase in ant richness, percentage of diaspores removed, and changes in species composition that in turn are correlated with changes in environmental variables. Additionally, we also verified which functional groups were primarily responsible for diaspore removal.

Similar alpha and beta diversity changes in tropical ant communities, comparing savannas and rainforests in Brazil and Indonesia.

Local biodiversity can be expected to be similar worldwide if environmental conditions are similar. Here, we hypothesize that tropical ant communities with different types of regional species pools but at similar habitat types in Brazil and Indonesia show similar diversity patterns at multiple spatial scales, when comparing (1) the relative contribution of alpha and beta diversity to gamma diversity; (2) the number of distinct communities (community differentiation); and (3) the drivers of β-diversity (species replacement or species loss/gain) at each spatial scale. In both countries, rainforests and savannas (biome scale) were represented by three landscapes (landscape scale), each with four transects (site scale) and each transect with 10 pitfall traps (local scale).

Milk traits of lactating cows submitted to feed restriction.

Data from five experiments with dairy cows where feed was restricted to 0, 40, and 50% of the ad libitum amount, with 259 observations, were subjected to multivariate analyses to determine the effects of severity and duration of feed restriction on production, physical-chemical characteristics, ethanol stability, and somatic cell score of milk. A negative relationship was seen between the severity and duration of feed restriction with milk production, lactose content, titratable acidity, and milk stability to the ethanol test. The milk stability to the ethanol test, protein content, milk yield, and somatic cells score were the most important attributes retained by the discriminant analysis.

A social and ecological assessment of tropical land uses at multiple scales: the Sustainable Amazon Network.

Science has a critical role to play in guiding more sustainable development trajectories. Here, we present the Sustainable Amazon Network (Rede Amazônia Sustentável, RAS): a multidisciplinary research initiative involving more than 30 partner organizations working to assess both social and ecological dimensions of land-use sustainability in eastern Brazilian Amazonia. The research approach adopted by RAS offers three advantages for addressing land-use sustainability problems: (i) the collection of synchronized and co-located ecological and socioeconomic data across broad gradients of past and present human use; (ii) a nested sampling design to aid comparison of ecological and socioeconomic conditions associated with different land uses across local, landscape and regional scales; and (iii) a strong engagement with a wide variety of actors and non-research institutions.

What is the effect of soil use on ant communities?

Studies on ant communities in agroecosystems have contributed to the knowledge of the effect of agricultural activities on biological communities. The aim of this study is to explain the effect of soil use on ant communities. We tested the hypothesis that there was a decrease in ant species richness and a change in the species composition at habitats with more intense soil use.