Richness and similarity of Passalidae (Coleoptera: Scarabaeoidea) from biological collections in the Brazilian Amazon.

Scientific collections are important sources of information on biodiversity that can be useful for faunistic, taxonomic and phylogenetic studies. The aim of this study was to investigate the fauna of Passalidae deposited in the zoological collections in the States of the Brazilian Amazon. 14,652 Passalidae specimens are deposited in scientific collections, distributed in two subfamilies, 7 genera and 82 species.

Eighty-four per cent of all Amazonian arboreal plant individuals are useful to humans.

Plants have been used in Amazonian forests for millennia and some of these plants are disproportionally abundant (hyperdominant). At local scales, people generally use the most abundant plants, which may be abundant as the result of management of indigenous peoples and local communities. However, it is unknown whether plant use is also associated with abundance at larger scales.

Using digital soil maps to infer edaphic affinities of plant species in Amazonia: Problems and prospects.

Amazonia combines semi-continental size with difficult access, so both current ranges of species and their ability to cope with environmental change have to be inferred from sparse field data. Although efficient techniques for modeling species distributions on the basis of a small number of species occurrences exist, their success depends on the availability of relevant environmental data layers. Soil data are important in this context, because soil properties have been found to determine plant occurrence patterns in Amazonian lowlands at all spatial scales.