Integrating economic costs and biological traits into global conservation priorities for carnivores.

Background: Prioritization schemes usually highlight species-rich areas, where many species are at imminent risk of extinction. To be ecologically relevant these schemes should also include species biological traits into area-setting methods. Furthermore, in a world of limited funds for conservation, conservation action is constrained by land acquisition costs.

Hung out to dry: choice of priority ecoregions for conserving threatened neotropical anurans depends on life-history traits.

Background: In the Neotropics, nearly 35% of amphibian species are threatened by habitat loss, habitat fragmentation, and habitat split; anuran species with different developmental modes respond to habitat disturbance in different ways. This entails broad-scale strategies for conserving biodiversity and advocates for the identification of high conservation-value regions that are significant in a global or continental context and that could underpin more detailed conservation assessments towards such areas.

Methodology/principal Findings: We identified key ecoregion sets for anuran conservation using an algorithm that favors complementarity (beta-diversity) among ecoregions.

Assemblages of endophagous insects on Asteraceae in São Paulo cerrados.

A survey of the endophagous insects fauna associated to Asteraceae capitula was carried out from 2000 to 2002 in eight cerrado sensu stricto sites located in the Brazilian state of Sdo Paulo. Sixty-four endophagous species of Diptera and Lepidoptera were recorded from 49 asteracean host plants. Approximately half of the species were obtained from a single locality, with a large proportion emerging from a single sample (unicates).