Identifying Roadkill Hotspots for Mammals in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest using a Functional Group Approach.

A critical step to design wildlife mitigating measures is the identification of roadkill hotspots. However, the effectiveness of mitigations based on roadkill hotspots depends on whether spatial aggregations are recurrent over time, spatially restricted, and most importantly, shared by species with diverse ecological and functional characteristics. We used a functional group approach to map roadkill hotspots for mammalian species along the BR-101/North RJ, a major road crossing important remnants of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest.

Altitudinal variation in butterfly community associated with climate and vegetation.

Elevation creates a variety of physical conditions in a relatively short distance, which makes mountains suitable for studying the effects of climate change on biodiversity. We investigated the importance of climate and vegetation for the distribution of butterflies from 800 to 1400 m elevation. We sampled butterflies, and woody and rosette plants and measured air temperature and humidity, wind speed and gust, and solar radiation.

Patch and landscape effects on forest-dependent dung beetles are masked by matrix-tolerant dung beetles in a mountaintop rainforest archipelago.

Naturally fragmented landscapes provide suitable scenarios through which to investigate patch and landscape effects on biodiversity patterns in areas that are isolated from the disturbances usually associated with human-made fragments. We aimed to investigate the patch and landscape effects on the diversity of forest-dependent and matrix-tolerant dung beetles in a naturally fragmented landscape. We also assessed the influence that seasonal and vegetation variations had on these dung beetles.

Variegated tropical landscapes conserve diverse dung beetle communities.

Background: Conserving biodiversity in tropical landscapes is a major challenge to scientists and conservationists. Current rates of deforestation, fragmentation, and land use intensification are producing variegated landscapes with undetermined values for the conservation of biological communities and ecosystem functioning. Here, we investigate the importance of tropical variegated landscapes to biodiversity conservation, using dung beetle as focal taxa.

Optimising bait for pitfall trapping of Amazonian dung beetles (Coleoptera: Scarabaeinae).

The accurate sampling of communities is vital to any investigation of ecological processes and biodiversity. Dung beetles have emerged as a widely used focal taxon in environmental studies and can be sampled quickly and inexpensively using baited pitfalls. Although there is now a wealth of available data on dung beetle communities from around the world, there is a lack of standardisation between sampling protocols for accurately sampling dung beetle communities.