Effects of deforestation on multitaxa community similarity in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest.

Habitat loss can lead to biotic homogenization (decrease in β diversity) or differentiation (increase in β diversity) of biological communities. However, it is unclear which of these ecological processes predominates in human-modified landscapes. We used data on vertebrates, invertebrates, and plants to quantify β diversity based on species occurrence and abundance among communities in 1367 landscapes with varying amounts of habitat (<30%, 30-60%, or >60% of forest cover) throughout the Brazilian Atlantic Forest.

Insect herbivores drive sex allocation in angiosperm flowers.

Why sex has evolved and is maintained is an open question in evolutionary biology. The Red Queen hypothesis predicts that host lineages subjected to more intense parasite pressure should invest more in sexual reproduction to continuously create novel defences against their rapidly evolving natural enemies. In this comparative study across the angiosperms, we show that hermaphrodite plant species associated with higher species richness of insect herbivores evolved flowers with higher biomass allocation towards the male sex, an indication of their greater outcrossing effort.

The maleness of larger angiosperm flowers.

Flower biomass varies widely across the angiosperms. Each plant species invests a given amount of biomass to construct its sex organs. A comparative understanding of how this limited resource is partitioned among primary (male and female structures) and secondary (petals and sepals) sexual organs on hermaphrodite species can shed light on general evolutionary processes behind flower evolution.

ATLANTIC EPIPHYTES: a data set of vascular and non-vascular epiphyte plants and lichens from the Atlantic Forest.

Epiphytes are hyper-diverse and one of the frequently undervalued life forms in plant surveys and biodiversity inventories. Epiphytes of the Atlantic Forest, one of the most endangered ecosystems in the world, have high endemism and radiated recently in the Pliocene. We aimed to (1) compile an extensive Atlantic Forest data set on vascular, non-vascular plants (including hemiepiphytes), and lichen epiphyte species occurrence and abundance; (2) describe the epiphyte distribution in the Atlantic Forest, in order to indicate future sampling efforts.

Testing the environmental filtering concept in global drylands.

1. The environmental filtering hypothesis predicts that the abiotic environment selects species with similar trait values within communities. Testing this hypothesis along multiple - and interacting - gradients of climate and soil variables constitutes a great opportunity to better understand and predict the responses of plant communities to ongoing environmental changes.

Ecological literacy and beyond: Problem-based learning for future professionals.

Ecological science contributes to solving a broad range of environmental problems. However, lack of ecological literacy in practice often limits application of this knowledge. In this paper, we highlight a critical but often overlooked demand on ecological literacy: to enable professionals of various careers to apply scientific knowledge when faced with environmental problems.

Territorial approach to increased energy consumption of water extraction from depletion of a highlands Mexican aquifer.

This work proposes a method to estimate increased energy consumption of pumping caused by a drawdown of groundwater level and the equivalent energy consumption of the motor-pump system in an aquifer under intensive exploitation. This method has been applied to the Valley of Toluca aquifer, located in the Mexican highlands, whose intensive exploitation is reflected in a decline in the groundwater level of between 0.10 and 1.

Modeling habitat split: landscape and life history traits determine amphibian extinction thresholds.

Habitat split is a major force behind the worldwide decline of amphibian populations, causing community change in richness and species composition. In fragmented landscapes, natural remnants, the terrestrial habitat of the adults, are frequently separated from streams, the aquatic habitat of the larvae. An important question is how this landscape configuration affects population levels and if it can drive species to extinction locally.

Effects of dam-induced landscape fragmentation on amazonian ant-plant mutualistic networks.

Mutualistic networks are critical to biological diversity maintenance; however, their structures and functionality may be threatened by a swiftly changing world. In the Amazon, the increasing number of dams poses a large threat to biological diversity because they greatly alter and fragment the surrounding landscape. Tight coevolutionary interactions typical of tropical forests, such as the ant-myrmecophyte mutualism, where the myrmecophyte plants provide domatia nesting space to their symbiotic ants, may be jeopardized by the landscape changes caused by dams.

The silent mass extinction of insect herbivores in biodiversity hotspots.

Habitat loss is silently leading numerous insects to extinction. Conservation efforts, however, have not been designed specifically to protect these organisms, despite their ecological and evolutionary significance. On the basis of species-host area equations, parameterized with data from the literature and interviews with botanical experts, I estimated the number of specialized plant-feeding insects (i.

Hung out to dry: choice of priority ecoregions for conserving threatened neotropical anurans depends on life-history traits.

Background: In the Neotropics, nearly 35% of amphibian species are threatened by habitat loss, habitat fragmentation, and habitat split; anuran species with different developmental modes respond to habitat disturbance in different ways. This entails broad-scale strategies for conserving biodiversity and advocates for the identification of high conservation-value regions that are significant in a global or continental context and that could underpin more detailed conservation assessments towards such areas.

Methodology/principal Findings: We identified key ecoregion sets for anuran conservation using an algorithm that favors complementarity (beta-diversity) among ecoregions.

Habitat split and the global decline of amphibians.

The worldwide decline in amphibians has been attributed to several causes, especially habitat loss and disease. We identified a further factor, namely "habitat split"-defined as human-induced disconnection between habitats used by different life history stages of a species-which forces forest-associated amphibians with aquatic larvae to make risky breeding migrations between suitable aquatic and terrestrial habitats. In the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, we found that habitat split negatively affects the richness of species with aquatic larvae but not the richness of species with terrestrial development (the latter can complete their life cycle inside forest remnants).