Two centuries of ornithological exploration of the Rio Doce Basin, southeastern Brazil. Part II-A catalogue of its birds and a gazetteer.

The Rio Doce Hydrographic Basin (RDB) lies almost completely in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, a highly threatened tropical rainforest. The RDB has suffered dramatic anthropogenic impacts during the last two centuries and is currently one of the most degraded regions in southeastern Brazil. In this paper, we gathered 140,742 bird records collected since the early 19th by more than two thousand naturalists, professional scientists, and citizen scientists.

Avian host composition, local speciation and dispersal drive the regional assembly of avian malaria parasites in South American birds.

Identifying the ecological factors that shape parasite distributions remains a central goal in disease ecology. These factors include dispersal capability, environmental filters and geographic distance. Using 520 haemosporidian parasite genetic lineages recovered from 7,534 birds sampled across tropical and temperate South America, we tested (a) the latitudinal diversity gradient hypothesis and (b) the distance-decay relationship (decreasing proportion of shared species between communities with increasing geographic distance) for this host-parasite system.