Species traits shape the relationship between local and regional species abundance distributions

The species abundance distribution (SAD) depicts the relative abundance of species within a community, which is a key concept in ecology. Here, we test whether SADs are more likely to either follow a lognormal-like or follow a logseries-like distribution and how that may change with spatial scale. Our results show that the shape of SADs changes from logseries-like at small, plot scales to lognormal-like at large, landscape scales.However, the rate at which the SAD’s shape changes also depends on species traits linked to the spatial distribution of individuals. Specifically, we show for oligophagous and small macro-moth species that a logseries distribution is more likely at small scales and a lognormal distribution is more likely at large scales, whereas the logseries distribution fits well at both small and large scales for polyphagous and large species. We also show that SAD moments scale as power laws as a function of spatial scale, and we assess the performance of Tchebichef moments and polynomials to reconstruct SADs at the landscape scale from information at local scales. Overall, the method performed well and reproduced the shapes of the empirical distributionsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Medical assessments and measurements in ELSA-Brasil

Este artigo descreve os exames clínicos realizados no Estudo Longitudinal de Saúde do Adulto (ELSA-Brasil). Alguns deles (antropometria, pressão arterial e índice tornozelo-braquial) já têm uso clínico consolidado. Outros, como a velocidade de onda de pulso, variabilidade da frequência cardíaca e medida da espessura médio-intimal de carótidas, carecem de valor de referência na população brasileira não doente e podem constituir preditores importantes de desfechos cardiovasculares. A medida da pressão arterial após manobra postural foi incluída no ELSA-Brasil porque foi pouco testada em estudos epidemiológicos. O ELSA-Brasil inovou na realização do índice tornozelo-braquial, ao usar um aparelho automático em substituição à coluna de mercúrio na medida da pressão arterial, e também na medida do diâmetro ântero-posterior do lobo direito do fígado pela ultrassonografia, proposta para avaliação quantitativa da doença hepática gordurosa não-alcoólica. Os participantes são indivíduos mais jovens (a partir dos 35 anos) do que em outras coortes focadas no estudo da aterosclerose subclínica. A inclusão de indivíduos mais jovens e a diversidade dos exames realizados tornam o ELSA-Brasil um estudo relevante no contexto da epidemiologia brasileira e internacional.The article describes assessments and measurements performed in the Brazilian Longitudinal Study for Adult Health (ELSA-Brasil). Some assessments including anthropometric assessment, casual blood pressure measurement, and ankle-brachial index have an established clinical application while others including pulse wave velocity, heart rate variability, and carotid intima-media thickness have no established application and do not have reference values for healthy Brazilian population but may be important predictors of cardiovascular outcomes. Blood pressure measurement following postural change maneuver was included in the ELSA-Brasil because it has not been much tested in epidemiological studies. Innovative approaches were developed for assessing the ankle-brachial index using an automatic device instead of the mercury column to measure blood pressure and for assessing the anterior-posterior diameter of the right lobe of the liver by ultrasound for quantitative assessment of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. All ELSA-Brasil subjects were younger (35 years or more) than those included in other cohorts studying subclinical atherosclerosis. The inclusion of younger individuals and a variety of assessments make the ELSA-Brasil a relevant epidemiology study nationwide and worldwide

Pervasive gaps in Amazonian ecological research

Biodiversity loss is one of the main challenges of our time,1,2 and attempts to address it require a clear un derstanding of how ecological communities respond to environmental change across time and space.3,4 While the increasing availability of global databases on ecological communities has advanced our knowledge of biodiversity sensitivity to environmental changes,5–7 vast areas of the tropics remain understudied.8–11 In the American tropics, Amazonia stands out as the world’s most diverse rainforest and the primary source of Neotropical biodiversity,12 but it remains among the least known forests in America and is often underrepre sented in biodiversity databases.13–15 To worsen this situation, human-induced modifications16,17 may elim inate pieces of the Amazon’s biodiversity puzzle before we can use them to understand how ecological com munities are responding. To increase generalization and applicability of biodiversity knowledge,18,19 it is thus crucial to reduce biases in ecological research, particularly in regions projected to face the most pronounced environmental changes. We integrate ecological community metadata of 7,694 sampling sites for multiple or ganism groups in a machine learning model framework to map the research probability across the Brazilian Amazonia, while identifying the region’s vulnerability to environmental change. 15%–18% of the most ne glected areas in ecological research are expected to experience severe climate or land use changes by 2050. This means that unless we take immediate action, we will not be able to establish their current status, much less monitor how it is changing and what is being lostinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Photography-based taxonomy is inadequate, unnecessary, and potentially harmful for biological sciences

The question whether taxonomic descriptions naming new animal species without type specimen(s) deposited in collections should be accepted for publication by scientific journals and allowed by the Code has already been discussed in Zootaxa (Dubois & Nemésio 2007; Donegan 2008, 2009; Nemésio 2009a–b; Dubois 2009; Gentile & Snell 2009; Minelli 2009; Cianferoni & Bartolozzi 2016; Amorim et al. 2016). This question was again raised in a letter supported by 35 signatories published in the journal Nature (Pape et al. 2016) on 15 September 2016. On 25 September 2016, the following rebuttal (strictly limited to 300 words as per the editorial rules of Nature) was submitted to Nature, which on 18 October 2016 refused to publish it. As we think this problem is a very important one for zoological taxonomy, this text is published here exactly as submitted to Nature, followed by the list of the 493 taxonomists and collection-based researchers who signed it in the short time span from 20 September to 6 October 2016

Pervasive gaps in Amazonian ecological research

Biodiversity loss is one of the main challenges of our time,1,2 and attempts to address it require a clear understanding of how ecological communities respond to environmental change across time and space.3,4 While the increasing availability of global databases on ecological communities has advanced our knowledge of biodiversity sensitivity to environmental changes,5,6,7 vast areas of the tropics remain understudied.8,9,10,11 In the American tropics, Amazonia stands out as the world's most diverse rainforest and the primary source of Neotropical biodiversity,12 but it remains among the least known forests in America and is often underrepresented in biodiversity databases.13,14,15 To worsen this situation, human-induced modifications16,17 may eliminate pieces of the Amazon's biodiversity puzzle before we can use them to understand how ecological communities are responding. To increase generalization and applicability of biodiversity knowledge,18,19 it is thus crucial to reduce biases in ecological research, particularly in regions projected to face the most pronounced environmental changes. We integrate ecological community metadata of 7,694 sampling sites for multiple organism groups in a machine learning model framework to map the research probability across the Brazilian Amazonia, while identifying the region's vulnerability to environmental change. 15%–18% of the most neglected areas in ecological research are expected to experience severe climate or land use changes by 2050. This means that unless we take immediate action, we will not be able to establish their current status, much less monitor how it is changing and what is being lost

Aplicação de modelos de agentes e redes complexas na caracterização e estudo da interação entre insetos sociais, com enfoque em formigas

Insetos sociais são conhecidos pela capacidade que possuem de gerar comportamentos coletivos robustos a partir de informações limitadas ao nível de indivíduo, sem que haja um controle central. Esta propriedade de geração de padrões a partir de regras locais é conhecida como auto-organização. As formigas são um exemplo de sucesso ecológico e o único grupo exclusivamente eusocial dentro de Hymenoptera. Devido a sua abundância e diversidade de hábitos alimentares exercem efeitos importantes na maioria dos ecossistemas terrestres. Dentre os vários tipos de interação que ocorrem entre formigas, a limpeza mútua (allogrooming) está entre os principais atos comportamentais, onde membros de determinada espécie executam a limpeza em outros indivíduos pertencente aos seu grupo social. Nesta tese buscamos investigar as redes de interações geradas pelo modelo proposto por Miramontes et al. (1993), o qual simula o comportamento individual de formigas, mais especificamente processos de ativação e inativação gerados por interações locais, as quais levam a sincronização temporal de atividades da colônia. Uma extensão do modelo Miramontes et al. (1993) para duas castas de formigas tecelãs foi construída. Nesse novo modelo foi utilizado dados etológicos de limpeza mútua (allogrooming) obtidos do trabalho de Blonder & Dornhaus (2011), e o ato de ativação e inativação das castas e da colônia, como descrito mo modelo de Miramontes et al. (1993). Os resultados obtidos sugerem que a densidade da colônia está entre 0,20 a 0,50, pois nesse intervalo a colônia tem altos valores de coeficiente de agrupamento e razão sinal-ruído, e baixos valores de caminho médio mínimo e período de sincronizaçãoSocial insects are known to have the ability to generate robust collective behavior from the limited information at the individual level, without central control. This property of generating patterns from local rules is known as self-organization. The aims of this study were to characterize the networks of interactions generated by the model proposed by Miramontes et al. (1993), which simulates individual behavior of ants, more specifically the activation and inactivation processes generated by local interactions, which cause the temporal synchronization of activities of the colony. A second model was proposed from the model Miramontes et al. (1993) for two castes of weaver ants, in this model was used ethological data of allogrooming and the act of activation and inactivation of caste and colony. The results show that the density of the colony is between 0.20 to 0.50, the colony as this range has high clustering coefficient values and signal to noise ratio, and low values of average path length and minimum synchronization period. We still have the topology of interactions for the act allogrooming of the colony changes with time, initially the distribution of degrees follows a power law, then a Poisson distribution. The model indicates that the initial network behavior generated by the act allogrooming is the type of scale freeCoordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP

Data from: Habitat amount, not patch size and isolation, drives species richness of macro‐moth communities in countryside landscapes

Aim: Our aim is to test whether species richness patterns are best explained by the effect of the total amount of habitat within the landscape, or instead by a combination of patch size and patch isolation effects. To this end, we jointly contrast the habitat amount hypothesis and countryside biogeography with patch size and isolation concepts from island biogeography. Location: Three multi-habitat landscapes in Peneda-Gerês National Park, NW Portugal. Taxon: Macro-moths (Lepidoptera). Methods: Light-trapping using a semi-nested design at 84 fixed sites which were each repeatedly sampled six times. Results: Autocovariate models show that sampling sites with a higher number of forest and meadow macro-moth species (alpha diversity) were surrounded by a higher amount of forest and meadow habitat, respectively within a 160 and 320 m radius (scale of effect). These top-ranked models, containing only habitat amount as a significant variable, had lower AIC than models (only) containing patch size and/or isolation. Complementary to this, the countryside species-area relationship (SAR) model outperforms the classic SAR model, so that the effective area of habitat explains landscape species richness (gamma diversity) across spatial scales (beta diversity) better than the classic SAR. Specifically, we show that forest macro-moths have a higher spatial turnover than meadow macro-moths and that, on average, there are more species in forest than in meadow habitat. Main conclusions: The habitat amount hypothesis predicts alpha species richness in multi-habitat landscapes better than do patch size and isolation while the countryside SAR predicts beta and gamma diversity better than the classic SAR. We suggest that evidence is mounting to revise the application of the classical approaches of island biogeography and metapopulation theory to conservation biogeography