Aurelio Pais

• Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
• Lecturer at Universidade Zambeze

Carbon stock and uptake are among the main ecosystem services provided by tropical forests. Understanding the role of different drivers in current patterns of carbon stock and uptake is critical to predicting tropical forest responses to environmental changes. That said, taxonomic identity and evolutionary relatedness among taxa may synthesize intr...

Shifts in hydrological regimes alter river flow rates and flood pulses, decrease environmental heterogeneity and the floristic-structural complexity of associated plant communities. We tested the hypothesis that drought events affect plant community composition and structure at a small-scale within a riparian fragment towards a reduction in florist...

Aims We aimed at disentangling the effects of spatial distance, current, and past environmental dissimilarity, and their combinations on tree community taxonomic and phylogenetic turnover by addressing the following questions: a) Is tree community taxonomic and phylogenetic turnover related to the indirect effects of spatial distance via environmen...

The present study was carried out in Limpopo National Park (LNP) with the objective to map floristic communities that occur inside the park. Three (3) Landsat 8 satellite images were obtained by Operational Land Imager (OLI) and Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) tools and were pre-processed and classified, culminating in six (6) types of land use and...

Discrete thresholds of structural or functional decline of a vegetation type are not readily apparent, as a vegetation type can slowly decline leading to transformations in its species composition and weakened or altered functions. However, forest monitoring can be used to assess changes in ecological functions in community structure and functional...

This study tested floristic and structural links existing in seasonally dry tropical forests (SDTFs) fragments on carbonate rocky outcrops among three (3) phytogeographic domains (Atlantic, Caatinga and Cerrado) in Brazil. Although included in large-scale SDTFs studies, these disjunctions under limestone are in part poorly understood and little is...

Tropical forests are vital for global biodiversity, carbon storage and local livelihoods, yet they are increasingly under threat from human activities. Large-scale land acquisitions have emerged as an important mechanism linking global resource demands to forests in the Global South, yet their influence on tropical deforestation remains unclear. He...

Species–habitat associations can be used as a proxy for species niches. Previous research has shown that niche plasticity may increase diversity in plant communities, and that plasticity may be linked to variations in species fitness. Spatial and temporal aspects of the niche are of interest to understand community structure, but the temporal dimen...

Savannas cover 60% of the land surface in Southern Africa, with fires and herbivory playing a key role in their ecology. The Limpopo National Park (LNP) is a 10,000 km2 conservation area in southern Mozambique and key to protecting savannas in the region. Fire is an important factor in LNP's landscapes, but little is known about its role in the par...

O presente estudo foi realizado no Parque Ecológico Quedas do Rio Bonito, Município de Lavras, Estado de Minas Gerais e objetivou a avaliação da dinâmica florestal entre os anos de 2001 e 2016, por forma a entender após o disturbiu de fogo que abalou a floresta em 2011 se houve variações nas taxas de dinâmica no gradiente de vegetação em relação a...

RESUMEN El estudio se llevó a cabo el 31 de agosto de 2013, en el vivero de la Facultad de Agronomía y Forestal, Universidad Zambezia, ubicado en los terrenos de la misma institución, con el objetivo de evaluar el efecto de las auxinas naturales (IAA) producidas por la semilla de maíz en germinación en la propagación vegetativa de Pterocarpus angol...