Retrieving biodiversity data from multiple sources: making secondary data standardised and accessible.

Biodiversity data, particularly species occurrence and abundance, are indispensable for testing empirical hypothesis in natural sciences. However, datasets built for research programmes do not often meet FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) principles, which raises questions about data quality, accuracy and availability. The 21 century has markedly been a new era for data science and analytics and every effort to aggregate, standardise, filter and share biodiversity data from multiple sources have become increasingly necessary.

Zooplankton community attributes in an oligo-mesotrophic reservoir: A comparative study of two sampling strategies.

Studies of the limnetic zooplankton in Brazilian freshwater have been done using several sampling strategies which are frequently associated to personal preferences, system constraints and objectives of the studies. It is known that a better sampling technique exists for each group of investigated zooplankton. So, the challenge is to provide a good sampling method for all groups at once.

Predicting temporal variation in zooplankton beta diversity is challenging.

Beta diversity, the spatial variation in species composition, has been related to different explanatory variables, including environmental heterogeneity, productivity and connectivity. Using a long-term time series of zooplankton data collected over 62 months in a tropical reservoir (Ribeirão das Lajes Reservoir, Rio de Janeiro State, Brazil), we tested whether beta diversity (as measured across six sites distributed along the main axis of the reservoir) was correlated with environmental heterogeneity (spatial environmental variation in a given month), chlorophyll-a concentration (a surrogate for productivity) and water level. We did not found evidence for the role of these predictors, suggesting the need to reevaluate predictions or at least to search for better surrogates of the processes that hypothetically control beta diversity variation.

The effect of seasonality on the structure of rotifers in a black-water shallow lake in Central Amazonia.

Rotifers have often been used as indicators of sudden changes in physical and chemical features of the aquatic environment. Such features vary greatly during flood pulse events in small lakes connected to major floodplains. However, few are the studies that investigate the consequences of the flood pulse in rotifer species composition, abundance, richness and diversity, especially in Amazonian lakes.