Differential response of fire on the community dynamics of five insect taxa in a tropical mountaintop forest archipelago.

The Earth's most diverse group of organisms is facing an imminent crisis, as recent investigations suggest a remarkable decline in insect diversity. Within this context, altimontane forest islands might emerge as important refuges holding an invaluable diversity of species that would be doomed to disappear. Here, we aimed to examine the impact of fire on the temporal variation of ant, bee, butterfly, dung beetle, and wasp communities in natural and highly threatened altimontane forest islands.

Legume abundance along successional and rainfall gradients in Neotropical forests.

The nutrient demands of regrowing tropical forests are partly satisfied by nitrogen-fixing legume trees, but our understanding of the abundance of those species is biased towards wet tropical regions. Here we show how the abundance of Leguminosae is affected by both recovery from disturbance and large-scale rainfall gradients through a synthesis of forest inventory plots from a network of 42 Neotropical forest chronosequences. During the first three decades of natural forest regeneration, legume basal area is twice as high in dry compared with wet secondary forests.

Determining the K coefficient to leaf area index estimations in a tropical dry forest.

Vegetation indices are useful tools to remotely estimate several important parameters related to ecosystem functioning. However, improving and validating estimations for a wide range of vegetation types are necessary. In this study, we provide a methodology for the estimation of the leaf area index (LAI) in a tropical dry forest (TDF) using the light diffusion through the canopy as a function of the successional stage.

(Hemiptera: Psyllidae) attack patterns on different genotypes.

Background: The red gum lerp psyllid, Moore (Hemiptera: Psyllidae), an eucalypt insect pest from Australia, was reported in Brazil in 2003. This study evaluated damage patterns of this pest on Dehn (Myrtaceae) and its hybrids X (urocam) and X (urograndis). In addition, parasitism rates of Riek (Hymenoptera: Encyrtidae) on collected on different eucalypt genotypes are reported.