Publications by authors named "Jorge Ahumada"

Article Synopsis
  • Changes in lunar illumination affect the risks and opportunities for animals, influencing their behavior and interactions, particularly in tropical forests.
  • The study analyzed long-term data from 86 mammal species across 17 protected forests, revealing that many species avoid moonlight during full moons (lunar phobia) more than they are attracted to it (lunar philia).
  • The findings highlight that lunar phases significantly influence mammal activity even in dense forests, which may be more pronounced in areas that are degraded or fragmented.
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Addressing the ongoing biodiversity crisis requires identifying the winners and losers of global change. Species are often categorized based on how they respond to habitat loss; for example, species restricted to natural environments, those that most often occur in anthropogenic habitats, and generalists that do well in both. However, species might switch habitat affiliations across time and space: an organism may venture into human-modified areas in benign regions but retreat into thermally buffered forested habitats in areas with high temperatures.

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  • Reliable maps of species distributions, like the IUCN range maps, are crucial for biodiversity research but often don't match actual occurrence data.
  • A study found that camera traps detected only 39% of expected species based on IUCN and recent area of habitat (AOH) maps, with most mismatches occurring near range edges.
  • The findings highlight that while range maps may not miss areas where species exist, they often include areas where species are absent, stressing the need to combine maps with ground-based data for better conservation planning.
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Protected areas (PAs) play a vital role in wildlife conservation. Nonetheless there is concern and uncertainty regarding how and at what spatial scales anthropogenic stressors influence the occurrence dynamics of wildlife populations inside PAs. Here we assessed how anthropogenic stressors influence occurrence dynamics of 159 mammal species in 16 tropical PAs from three biogeographic regions.

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Growing threats to biodiversity demand timely, detailed information on species occurrence, diversity and abundance at large scales. Camera traps (CTs), combined with computer vision models, provide an efficient method to survey species of certain taxa with high spatio-temporal resolution. We test the potential of CTs to close biodiversity knowledge gaps by comparing CT records of terrestrial mammals and birds from the recently released Wildlife Insights platform to publicly available occurrences from many observation types in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility.

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The objective of this study was to describe the interventions for the labor reintegration of workers on medical leave due to musculoskeletal and mental health diseases, according to actions related to the worker, the employer, and the workplace. This study consists of a qualitative systematic review, without restriction of publication date, conducted in the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) and MEDLINE/PubMed scientific bases. In addition, the Epistemonikos database was used.

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An animal's daily use of time (their "diel activity") reflects their adaptations, requirements, and interactions, yet we know little about the underlying processes governing diel activity within and among communities. Here we examine whether community-level activity patterns differ among biogeographic regions, and explore the roles of top-down versus bottom-up processes and thermoregulatory constraints. Using data from systematic camera-trap networks in 16 protected forests across the tropics, we examine the relationships of mammals' diel activity to body mass and trophic guild.

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The spatial aggregation of species pairs often increases with the ecological similarity of the species involved. However, the way in which environmental conditions and anthropogenic activity affect the relationship between spatial aggregation and ecological similarity remains unknown despite the potential for spatial associations to affect species interactions, ecosystem function, and extinction risk. Given that human disturbance has been shown to both increase and decrease spatial associations among species pairs, ecological similarity may have a role in mediating these patterns.

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The structure of forest mammal communities appears surprisingly consistent across the continental tropics, presumably due to convergent evolution in similar environments. Whether such consistency extends to mammal occupancy, despite variation in species characteristics and context, remains unclear. Here we ask whether we can predict occupancy patterns and, if so, whether these relationships are consistent across biogeographic regions.

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Article Synopsis
  • * Researchers used camera traps to gather a comprehensive data set of 154,123 records from 317 species of mammals, birds, and reptiles across eight Amazonian countries.
  • * This extensive data set facilitates new ecological research on the impacts of habitat loss and climate change in the Amazon, and its use is encouraged with proper citation.
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  • Over the last 100 years, more people have died and lost money because of viral illnesses that humans get from animals.
  • Some leaders suggest we should only react and try to fix things after people get sick, but many experts think this isn't the best plan.
  • They recommend taking steps before problems happen, like keeping a closer watch on wildlife viruses, controlling animal trade better, and reducing deforestation, which are much cheaper than the losses we suffer from the illnesses.
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Mind is multi-levelled displaying an eons-long prehistory, while as Freud well knew civilization is new and frail: in biological evolution Thanatos long antecedes Eros. Complex intraspecies interchanges in higher animals proceeding by analogic communication give a firm place to Freudian Dingvorstellungen. Self-recognition and reflective thought come exceedingly late, in apes, requiring affectionate baby-mother mirroring.

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In a scenario where escalating human activities lead to several environmental changes and, consequently, affect mammal abundance and distribution, β-diversity may increase due to differences among sites. Using the ecological uniqueness approach, we analyzed β-diversity patterns of ground-dwelling mammal communities recorded through comprehensive camera trap monitoring within eight tropical forests protected areas in Mesoamerica and South America under variable landscape contexts. We aimed to investigate whether the contribution of single sites (LCBD) and single species (SCBD) to overall β-diversity could be explained by community metrics and environmental variables, and by species metrics and biological traits, respectively.

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A variety of factors can affect the biodiversity of tropical mammal communities, but their relative importance and directionality remain uncertain. Previous global investigations of mammal functional diversity have relied on range maps instead of observational data to determine community composition. We test the effects of species pools, habitat heterogeneity, primary productivity and human disturbance on the functional diversity (dispersion and richness) of mammal communities using the largest standardized tropical forest camera trap monitoring system, the Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring (TEAM) Network.

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Article Synopsis
  • Carnivores, especially cats, serve as important models for understanding how similar species coexist and how their interactions influence community structure and diversity.
  • The study focuses on five species of cats in Neotropical forests, analyzing their habitat use and temporal activity through advanced occupancy models that consider habitat features and interspecies interactions.
  • Findings suggest that prey availability primarily drives habitat use rather than competition, with different patterns of activity signaling how these species manage coexistence in overlapping environments.
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  • Understanding the biogeographic affinities of tropical forests helps explain regional differences in their structure, diversity, and responses to global changes.
  • The study classifies the world's tropical forests into five main floristic regions based on their phylogenetic relationships: Indo-Pacific, Subtropical, African, American, and Dry forests.
  • Findings challenge the traditional division of tropical forests and suggest a connection between northern-hemisphere Subtropical forests in Asia and America, as well as the existence of a global dry forest region.
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Much biodiversity data is collected worldwide, but it remains challenging to assemble the scattered knowledge for assessing biodiversity status and trends. The concept of Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) was introduced to structure biodiversity monitoring globally, and to harmonize and standardize biodiversity data from disparate sources to capture a minimum set of critical variables required to study, report and manage biodiversity change. Here, we assess the challenges of a 'Big Data' approach to building global EBV data products across taxa and spatiotemporal scales, focusing on species distribution and abundance.

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The current Zika health crisis in the Americas has created an intense interest in mosquito control methods and products. Mosquito vectors of Zika are of the genus Aedes, mainly the yellow fever mosquito, Aedes aegypti. L.

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While there are well established early warning systems for a number of natural phenomena (e.g. earthquakes, catastrophic fires, tsunamis), we do not have an early warning system for biodiversity.

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The conservation of tropical forest carbon stocks offers the opportunity to curb climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and simultaneously conserve biodiversity. However, there has been considerable debate about the extent to which carbon stock conservation will provide benefits to biodiversity in part because whether forests that contain high carbon density in their aboveground biomass also contain high animal diversity is unknown. Here, we empirically examined medium to large bodied ground-dwelling mammal and bird (hereafter "wildlife") diversity and carbon stock levels within the tropics using camera trap and vegetation data from a pantropical network of sites.

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