Lessons from the historical dynamics of environmental law enforcement in the Brazilian Amazon.

Here, we analyze critical changes in environmental law enforcement in the Brazilian Amazon between 2000 and 2020. Based on a dataset of law enforcement indicators, we discuss how these changes explain recent Amazon deforestation dynamics. Our analysis also covers changes in the legal prosecution process and documents a militarization of enforcement between 2018 and 2022.

A near real-time web-system for predicting fire spread across the Cerrado biome.

Wildfires are aggravating due to climate change. Public policies need territorial intelligence to prevent and promptly fight fires, especially in vast regions like Brazil. To this end, we have developed a fire-spread prediction system for the Brazilian Cerrado, the biome most affected by wildfires in South America.

BioDinamica: a toolkit for analyses of biodiversity and biogeography on the Dinamica-EGO modelling platform.

Biogeography and macroecology are at the heart of the debate on ecology and evolution. We have developed the BioDinamica package, a suite of user-friendly graphical programs for analysing spatial patterns of biogeography and macroecology. BioDinamica includes analyses of beta-diversity, species richness, endemicity, phylo-diversity, species distribution models, predictive models of biodiversity patterns, and several tools for spatial biodiversity analysis.

Modelling Highly Biodiverse Areas in Brazil.

Traditional conservation techniques for mapping highly biodiverse areas assume there to be satisfactory knowledge about the geographic distribution of biodiversity. There are, however, large gaps in biological sampling and hence knowledge shortfalls. This problem is even more pronounced in the tropics.

Dynamic and diverse amphibian assemblages: Can we differentiate natural processes from human induced changes?

Amphibians are sensitive to anthropogenic habitat alterations but also respond to natural drivers of assemblage composition at many levels. Additionally, they are usually hard to detect in field inventories. We used a multiscale approach, from microhabitat to the landscape levels, to try to understand the effects of natural changes, and try to distinguish them from the effects of landscape level anthropogenic changes, on dynamic and diverse anuran assemblages, taking imperfect detection into account.

Current guidelines for prostate cancer screening: A systematic review and minimal core proposal.

Objective: Considering the importance of screening for prostate cancer, the possibility of damage resulting from indiscriminate screening and the difficulty of disclosure and adherence to the main guidelines on the subject, we aimed to identify current guidelines, look for common approaches and establish a core of conducts.

Method: Systematic review of the literature on screening practice guidelines for prostate cancer searching the databases PubMed, Lilacs and Google Scholar and active search in the sites of several national health entities.

Results: Twelve (12) guidelines were selected, whose analysis resulted in the identification of six common points of conduct, with the following minimum core of recommendations: (1) screening indication or not: must be individualized, and preceded by an informed decision; (2) tests used: PSA with or without rectal digital examination; (3) age at which initiate testing in men in general risk: 50-55 years; (4) age at which to initiate testing in men at increased risk: 40-45 years; (5) the interval between screening: annual or biennial; and (6) age at which to discontinue testing: 70 years-old or life expectancy less than 10 years.

Publisher Correction: Biodiversity conservation gaps in the Brazilian protected areas.

A correction to this article has been published and is linked from the HTML and PDF versions of this paper. The error has been fixed in the paper.

Evolutionarily significant units of the critically endangered leaf frog (Anura, Phyllomedusidae) are not effectively preserved by the Brazilian protected areas network.

Protected areas (PAs) are essential for biodiversity conservation, but their coverage is considered inefficient for the preservation of all species. Many species are subdivided into evolutionarily significant units (ESUs) and the effectiveness of PAs in protecting them needs to be investigated. We evaluated the usefulness of the Brazilian PAs network in protecting ESUs of the critically endangered through ongoing climate change.

Spider species richness and sampling effort at Cracraft´S Belém Area of Endemism.

A list of spider species is presented for the Belém Area of Endemism, the most threatened region in the Amazon Basin, comprising portions of eastern State of Pará and western State of Maranhão, Brazil. The data are based both on records from the taxonomic and biodiversity survey literature and on scientific collection databases. A total of 319 identified species were recorded, with 318 occurring in Pará and only 22 in Maranhão.

Biodiversity conservation gaps in the Brazilian protected areas.

Although Brazil is a megadiverse country and thus a conservation priority, no study has yet quantified conservation gaps in the Brazilian protected areas (PAs) using extensive empirical data. Here, we evaluate the degree of biodiversity protection and knowledge within all the Brazilian PAs through a gap analysis of vertebrate, arthropod and angiosperm occurrences and phylogenetic data. Our results show that the knowledge on biodiversity in most Brazilian PAs remain scant as 71% of PAs have less than 0.

Biogeography of Amazon birds: rivers limit species composition, but not areas of endemism.

Amazonian rivers are usually suggested as dispersal barriers, limiting biogeographic units. This is evident in a widely accepted Areas of Endemism (AoEs) hypothesis proposed for Amazonian birds. We empirically test this hypothesis based on quantitative analyses of species distribution.

Delimiting areas of endemism through kernel interpolation.

We propose a new approach for identification of areas of endemism, the Geographical Interpolation of Endemism (GIE), based on kernel spatial interpolation. This method differs from others in being independent of grid cells. This new approach is based on estimating the overlap between the distribution of species through a kernel interpolation of centroids of species distribution and areas of influence defined from the distance between the centroid and the farthest point of occurrence of each species.

Strong spatial structure, Pliocene diversification and cryptic diversity in the Neotropical dry forest spider Sicarius cariri.

The Brazilian Caatinga is part of the seasonally dry tropical forests, a vegetation type disjunctly distributed throughout the Neotropics. It has been suggested that during Pleistocene glacial periods, these dry forests had a continuous distribution, so that these climatic shifts may have acted as important driving forces of the Caatinga biota diversification. To address how these events affected the distribution of a dry forest species, we chose Sicarius cariri, a spider endemic to the Caatinga, as a model.

Insulin alone or with captopril: effects on signaling pathways (AKT and AMPK) and oxidative balance after ischemia-reperfusion in isolated hearts.

Insulin and the inhibition of the renin-angiotensin system have independent benefits for ischemia-reperfusion injury, but their combination has not been tested. Our aim was to evaluate the effects of insulin+captopril on insulin/angiotensin signaling pathways and cardiac function in the isolated heart subjected to ischemia-reperfusion. Isolated hearts were perfused (Langendorff technique) with Krebs-Henseleit (KH) buffer for 25 min.

Effects of angiotensin-I and ischemia on functional recovery in isolated hearts.

Background: Cardiac arrest resuscitation can present myocardial dysfunction determined by ischemic time, and inhibition of the angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) can reduce cardiac dysfunction during reperfusion.

Objective: To investigate the effects of angiotensin-I and different periods of ischemia on functional recovery in isolated rat hearts.

Methods: Isolated hearts from Wistar rats (n=45; 250-300 g) were submitted to different periods of global ischemia (20, 25 or 30 min) and reperfused (30 min) with Krebs-Henseleit buffer alone or with the addition of 400 nmol/L angiotensin-I, or 400 nmol/L angiotensin-I + 100 μmol/L captopril along the reperfusion period.

Increased resistance to hydrogen peroxide-induced cardiac contracture is associated with decreased myocardial oxidative stress in hypothyroid rats.

The purpose of this study was to determine whether decreased oxidative stress would increase the resistance to cardiac contracture induced by H(2)O(2) in hypothyroid rats. Male Wistar rats were divided into two groups: control and hypothyroid. Hypothyroidism was induced via thyroidectomy.

Effects of environmental anoxia and different periods of reoxygenation on oxidative balance in gills of the estuarine crab Chasmagnathus granulata.

We investigated the effects of anoxia (8 h) and different periods of reoxygenation (20 and 40 min) on the oxidative balance in anterior and posterior gills of the crab Chasmagnathus granulata. Enzyme activity of catalase and GST was increased in the gills of the animals submitted to anoxia, and SOD activity was decreased. These enzymes returned approximately to control levels during the anoxia recovery time.