Hábitos alimenticios de la rana bromélicola Phyllodytes edelmoi Peixoto, Caramaschi & Freire, 2003 (Anura: Hylidae) del Estado de Alagoas, Noreste de Brasil

El género de hílidos Phyllodytes está compuesto por 12 especies distribuidas en el este de Brasil y conocidas por habitar estrictamente bromeliáceas. En este estudio se exploran los hábitos alimenticios de P. edelmoi y se testea la selectividad de las presas por la especie comparando las presas encontradas en los estómagos con la disponibilidad de presas en las bromelias. Nuestros resultados muestran que P. edelmoi consume grandes cantidades de hormigas a lo largo del año, por lo que podría considerarse una especie "especializada en hormigas". Este comportamiento alimenticio especializado podría ser considerado una sinapomorfia para el género Phyllodytes.The hylid frog genus Phyllodytes comprised 12 species distributed in eastern Brazil and knownto strictly inhabit inside bromeliads. In this study, we explore the feeding habits of P. edelmoiand test the prey selectivity of the species by comparing the prey items in the stomachs contentswith the availability of preys in bromeliads. Our results show that P. edelmoi consumes highamounts of ants along the year, and therefore it could be considered an ?ant specialist? species.This specialist feeding behaviour could be considered a synapomorphy of the genus Phyllodytes.Fil: Araujo-Vieira, Katyuscia. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Parque Centenario. Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales “Bernardino Rivadavia”; ArgentinaFil: Ubiratan G. Silva. Universidade Federal de Alagoas; BrasilFil: Jhonatan Guedes dos Santos. Universidade Federal de Alagoas; BrasilFil: Thame G. Ferreira. Departamento de Ecologia E Biomonitoramento; BrasilFil: Gabriel O. Skuk. Universidade Federal de Alagoas; Brasi

No visit, no interest: How COVID-19 has affected public interest in world's national parks

The use of digital content has become a powerful tool to evaluate and track macro-scale trends in human-nature relations. This is an emerging field of study known as conservation culturomics, that seeks to understand human culture through quantitative analysis in large bodies of digital content. Here, we used relative search volume on Google Search as a culturomic metric of public interest to investigate the global impact of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic on national parks (NPs). Specifically, we focus on the impacts of limiting people?s mobility (through social isolation and lock-down measures) on public interest in NPs, since this is likely to have a strong causal relationship with park visitation. We generated public interest data for 2411 NPs from around the world for the period January 2016 to July 2020, to explore the relationship between relative search volume and periods of greater and lesser mobility restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We observed a global trend of declining public interest in national parks during the initial phase of the coronavirus pandemic, although there was considerable variation between both parks and countries. For example, contrary to the global trend public interest in NPs increased in Finland during the first lock-down. Significantly, countries whose national parks are highly dependent on international visitors (e.g., South Africa and India) had very severe declines in public interest. Our study reinforces the key role that visitation plays in driving public interest in national parks and illustrates the utility of culturomic methods for monitoring human-park interactions at scale.Peer reviewe

A big data approach to identify the loss of coastal cultural ecosystem services caused by the 2019 Brazilian oil spill disaster

In August 2019, the Northeast coast of Brazil was impacted by an extensive oil spill, with immediate effects on marine and coastal ecosystems and significant impacts on tourism and food security. The human dimension of those impacts also includes the loss of cultural ecosystem services (CES); the non-material benefits stemming from strongly rooted cultural practices and relationships with nature. CES are of great importance for local residents and visitors that flock to Brazilian iconic beaches, however, they are difficult to measure using traditional assessment methods due to their subjective and non-tangible nature. Here, we use a big data approach to assess and map the loss of CES in the Northeast coast of Brazil caused by the recent oil spill. We analysed 2,880 digital images (published on the image sharing platform Flickr) taken before and during the disaster in affected locations, using a combination of automated techniques. Results showed a sharp decline in the number of users posting photos of locations affected by oil spill, and a decline in photos representing landscape and cultural appreciation. Our big data approach provides a fast and automated way to assess CES at large spatial scales that can be used to monitor the social impacts of environmental disasters.Peer reviewe

Digital data sources and methods for conservation culturomics

Peer reviewe

Public awareness and engagement in relation to the coastal oil spill in northeast Brazil

Social media data is a rich source of information to assess human activities in catastrophic events. Here, we use social media data to understand how the 2019 Brazilian oil spill influenced social attitudes. Data were collected from the globally popular Instagram platform between August 1, 2019 and March 1, 2020. First, we manually identified the 5 most popular (portuguese language) hashtags related to the oil spill #oleonononordeste;#desastreambiental;#ma rsemoleo;#sosnordeste;#ma rsempetroleo. In the sequence, we collected information on captions, post metadata and users associated with posts retrieved using the selected hashtags. We identified a total of 7,413 posts. These posts were grouped in topics: government (47.76%), protest (24.37%), volunteers (24.45%), biodiversity (0.003%), origin (0.006%), tourism (0.008%) and others (0.016%). All topics had the peak of posts in October and November 2019. Nevertheless, interest in the oil spill was temporary, with most posts appearing in the 2-4 months after the beginning of the disaster. Our findings illustrate the enormous potential of using social media data for understanding and monitoring human engagement with environmental disasters, but also suggest that conservationists and environmental groups may only have a limited 'window of opportunity' to engage and mobilize public support for remediation and restoration efforts.Peer reviewe

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

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

Evaluating public interest in protected areas using Wikipedia page views

Protected Areas (PAs) are the cornerstone of global conservation action and the most effective strategy for conserving the Earth’s biodiversity. Nevertheless, there is evidence that PAs are increasingly viewed by politicians and policy-makers as opportunity costs that constrain economic development. In the absence of societal resistance (‘push-back’) in the form of campaigns and/or lobbying, such attitudes leave many PAs vulnerable to downgrading, downsizing or degazettement (PADDD). The potential to mobilize public support for any given PA is difficult to directly measure, but is likely to be strongly correlated with contemporary levels of public interest and awareness. Here, we use Wikipedia page views (PVs) as a novel digital metric of public interest in PAs and demonstrate its utility through an analysis of Brazilian PAs. Because Brazil accounts for the vast majority of the World’s Portuguese speakers, we were able to generate separate metrics for national (PVs of Portuguese editions) and international (PVs of English editions) interest. We found that both national and international public interest is highest for larger, older PAs, especially National Parks. These results possibly reflect a historical bias towards designating the most iconic areas in the country first, with less scenic and more contested areas designated more recently. We also found that many PAs do not have a Wikipedia page, and many of those that do are rarely viewed by the public. The apparent low level of interest in these parks leaves them particularly vulnerable to development threats and, in our opinion, needs to be urgently addressed.publishe

Evaluating Public Interest in Protected Areas using Wikipedia Page Views

Protected Areas (PAs) are the cornerstone of global conservation action and the most effective strategy for conserving the Earth’s biodiversity. Nevertheless, there is evidence that PAs are increasingly viewed by politicians and policy-makers as opportunity costs that constrain economic development. In the absence of societal resistance (‘push-back’) in the form of campaigns and/or lobbying, such attitudes leave many PAs vulnerable to downgrading, downsizing or degazettement (PADDD). The potential to mobilize public support for any given PA is difficult to directly measure, but is likely to be strongly correlated with contemporary levels of public interest and awareness. Here, we use Wikipedia page views (PVs) as a novel digital metric of public interest in PAs and demonstrate its utility through an analysis of Brazilian PAs. Because Brazil accounts for the vast majority of the World’s Portuguese speakers, we were able to generate separate metrics for national (PVs of Portuguese editions) and international (PVs of English editions) interest. We found that both national and international public interest is highest for larger, older PAs, especially National Parks. These results possibly reflect a historical bias towards designating the most iconic areas in the country first, with less scenic and more contested areas designated more recently. We also found that many PAs do not have a Wikipedia page, and many of those that do are rarely viewed by the public. The apparent low level of interest in these parks leaves them particularly vulnerable to development threats and, in our opinion, needs to be urgently addressed.Peer reviewe