Mangroves occur in the tropics and subtropics. This region is constantly covered by clouds and therefore highly challenging to map and monitor. Technological advances in remote sensing have increased the flexibility of performing such analyses.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGiven the ecological and socioeconomic importance of the mangroves of the Brazilian Amazon coast, RapidEye satellite images were analyzed to recognize mangrove forest and salt flat changes to different land use through human activities. Results show that mangroves are still very well preserved, with less than 1% of the total converted to other uses, primarily urban areas and roads. These human activities have been the principal causes of use in the mangrove forest, driven by local anthropogenic pressures resulting from human settlements in the transition zone between the mainland and tidal flats.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDue to the global magnitude of forest degradation and deforestation and the high cost of ecological restoration, several approaches have been used to prioritize conservation or restoration areas based on different objectives and criteria. The present work aims to develop a multicriteria approach to defining forest restoration priority areas in the Itacaiúnas River basin, eastern Amazon, that maximizes the criteria equitably. The selected criteria were: improve forest connectivity, provide climatic refuges for biodiversity, mitigate the impacts of deforestation on streamflow, and improve the probability of natural regeneration.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDeveloping conservation strategies to mitigate cumulative impacts requires the understanding of historic land use and land cover changes at the regional scale. By using a multisensory and multitemporal approach, we identified the major changes driving cumulative impacts on native vegetation in northeastern Amazon. Comparing two regions, one with mining as the key driver and another where mining is associated with other industrial activities (cellulose), we explore the land use and land cover historic dynamics and derive implications for the assessment of cumulative impacts.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Physical activity has been associated with reduced risk of seven types of cancer. It remains unclear, however, whether muscle-strengthening activities also reduce cancer incidence and mortality.
Methods: PubMed, Embase, Web of Science and Scopus were searched from inception to March 2020.
Reliable estimates of biomass and carbon storage are essential for the understanding of the environmental drivers and processes that regulate the productivity of scrub forests. The present study estimated total (above-ground, AGB + below-ground, BGB) biomass and carbon storage of a scrub forest dominated by Avicennia germinans (L.) L.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMangroves play an essential ecological role in the maintenance of the coastal zone and are extremely important for the socioeconomics of coastal communities. However, mangrove ecosystems are impacted by a range of anthropogenic pressures, and the loss of this habitat can be attributed primarily to the human occupation of the coastal zone. In the present study, we analyzed the spatial patterns of land use in the mangrove of the Brazilian Amazon coast, and evaluated the anthropogenic drivers of this impact, using a remote sensing approach.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe eastern Brazilian Amazon contains many isolated ferruginous savanna ecosystem patches (locally known as 'canga vegetation') located on ironstone rocky outcrops on the top of plateaus and ridges, surrounded by tropical rainforests. In the Carajás Mineral Province (CMP), these outcrops contain large iron ore reserves that have been exploited by opencast mining since the 1980s. The canga vegetation is particularly impacted by mining, since the iron ores that occur are associated with this type of vegetation and currently, little is known regarding the extent of canga vegetation patches before mining activities began.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLong-term human-induced impacts have significantly changed the Amazonian landscape. The most dramatic land cover and land use (LCLU) changes began in the early 1970s with the establishment of the Trans-Amazon Highway and large government projects associated with the expansion of agricultural settlement and cattle ranching, which cleared significant tropical forest cover in the areas of new and accelerated human development. Taking the changes in the LCLU over the past four decades as a basis, this study aims to determine the consequences of land cover (forest and savanna) and land use (pasturelands, mining and urban) changes on the hydroclimatology of the Itacaiúnas River watershed area of the located in the southeastern Amazon region.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: The aim of this study was to investigate the cytotoxic effect of new 1,4-naphthoquinone- 1,2,3-triazoles, named C2 to C8 triazole derivatives, towards human cancer cell lines.
Methods: The effect on cell viability was assessed by MTT and propidium iodide assays. The cytotoxic effect of C2 and C3 in K562 and HL-60 cells were analyzed by flow cytometry, DNA fragmentation and reactive oxygen species (ROS) production.