Publications by authors named "Renato Garcia Rodrigues"
Article Synopsis
- Climate change is making dry areas drier, which can harm the environment and affect millions of people who rely on it.
- Scientists studied plants in a dry region of Brazil to find out which types of plants can help predict how ecosystems respond to dryness.
- They discovered certain plant groups that change in number with increasing dryness, especially those with strong defenses and special ways of making energy, and want to use this information to help protect and restore these environments.
Ecological indicators based on biodiversity metrics are valuable and cost-effective tools to quantify, track and understand the effects of climate change on ecosystems. Studying changes in these indicators along climatic gradients in space is a common approach to infer about potential impacts of climate change over time, overcoming the limitations of lack of sufficiently long time-series data. Here, we studied the response of complementary biodiversity metrics in plants: taxonomic diversity (species richness and Simpson index) and functional diversity (diversity and redundancy) in 113 sampling sites along a spatial aridity gradient (from 0.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDrylands are experiencing an overall increase in aridity that is predicted to intensify in the future due to climate change. This may cause changes in the structure and functioning of dryland ecosystems, affecting ecosystem services and human well-being. Therefore, detecting early signs of ecosystem change before irreversible damage takes place is important.
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