Carlos A. PeresUniversity of East Anglia | UEA · School of Environmental Sciences
Carlos A. Peres
PhD
About
706
Publications
441,096
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Introduction
Born in Belém, Brazil, Peres was exposed to Amazonian natural history from an early age. For the last 30 years he has been studying wildlife community ecology in Amazonian forests, the population ecology of key tropical forest resource populations, and the biological criteria for designing large nature reserves. He currently co-directs four ecology and conservation research programs in neotropical forests, including the ecology of key timber and non-timber forest resources; patterns of vertebrate assemblage structure in Amazonian forests; the biological dynamics of hyper-disturbed and fragmented forest landscapes, and the biodiversity consequences of land-use change. He has published ~400 papers on neotropical forest ecology and conservation at scales ranging from populations to landscapes
Additional affiliations
January 1996 - present
January 1994 - December 1995
January 1993 - December 1993
Education
January 1993 - December 1993
July 1987 - June 1991
August 1984 - December 1986
Publications
Publications (706)
Tropical wetlands are highly threatened socio-ecological systems, where local communities rely heavily on aquatic animal protein, such as fish, to meet food security. Here, we quantify how a ‘win-win’ community-based resource management program induced stock recovery of the world’s largest scaled freshwater fish (Arapaima gigas), providing both foo...
Significance
A standardized network of wildlife surveys across 166 Amazonian hunted and nonhunted forests, combined with basin-wide spatial modeling of central-place hunting pressure, reveal the degree to which arboreal frugivores have been extirpated by hunters and the spatial extent of overhunting for harvest-sensitive frugivore species across th...
The Amazon basin is the largest and most species-rich tropical forest and river system in the world, playing a pivotal role in global climate regulation and harboring hundreds of traditional and indigenous cultures. It is a matter of intense debate whether the ecosystem is threatened by hunting practices, whereby an “empty forest” loses critical ec...
Mega hydropower projects in tropical forests pose a major emergent threat to terrestrial and freshwater biodiversity worldwide. Despite the unprecedented number of existing, under-construction and planned hydroelectric dams in lowland tropical forests, long-term effects on biodiversity have yet to be evaluated. We examine how medium and large-bodie...
Islands formed upstream of mega hydroelectric dams are excellent experimental landscapes to assess the impacts of habitat fragmentation on biodiversity. We examined the effects of plot‐, patch‐ and landscape‐scale variables on the patterns of floristic diversity across 34 forest islands that had experienced 26 years of isolation since the creation...
The urgent need to mitigate and adapt to climate change necessitates a comprehensive understanding of carbon cycling dynamics. Traditionally, global carbon cycle models have focused on vegetation, but recent research suggests that animals can play a significant role in carbon dynamics under some circumstances, potentially enhancing the effectivenes...
The rise in species richness with area is one of the few ironclad ecological relationships. Yet, little is known about the spatial scaling of alternative dimensions of diversity. Here, we provide empirical evidence for a relationship between the richness of acoustic traits emanating from a landscape, or soundscape richness, and island area, which w...
We describe the geographical variation in tree species composition across Amazonian forests and show how environmental conditions are associated with species turnover. Our analyses are based on 2023 forest inventory plots (1 ha) that provide abundance data for a total of 5188 tree species. Within-plot species composition reflected both local enviro...
Defaunation is an increasingly pervasive process, reaching ever larger spatial scales worldwide. We integrated data on thousands of putative local mammal assemblages across the Neotropics into 518 metacommunities to predict the phylogenetic trait‐based effects of regional defaunation—here defined as meta‐extirpation (i.e. extinction at the metacomm...
In certain Amazonian regions, 25% of hunting occurs at salt licks, sites rich in natural minerals often near creeks prone to periodic flooding. Here, animals engage in geophagy for mineral supplementation and detoxification what enables local hunter to observe their behaviour while waiting their target. Our study evaluates seasonal salt lick availa...
Ecologists have historically quantified fundamental biodiversity patterns, including species‐area relationships (SARs) and beta diversity, using observed species counts. However, imperfect detection may often bias derived community metrics and subsequent community models. Although several statistical methods claim to correct for imperfect detection...
Hydropower development has become an important driver of habitat loss and fragmentation across lowland tropical forests. Despite ample evidence on the detrimental effects of insular habitat fragmentation on biodiversity, invertebrate taxa, that may be critical to ecosystem functioning, have been overlooked. We assessed the assemblage-level response...
Aim
Wildlife overexploitation, either for food consumption or for the pet trade, is one of the main threats to bird species in tropical forests. Yet, the spatial distribution and intensity of harvesting pressure on tropical birds remain challenging to quantify. Here, we identify the drivers of hunting‐induced declines in bird abundance and quantify...
River damming by hydroelectric plants interrupts the continuity of rivers and causes the flooding of adjacent terrestrial ecosystems. Assessments of the impacts of major hydroelectric dams on species and the functional responses of communities to flooding are scarce. We used data from eight years of forest monitoring around a - 100-km section of th...
Amazonia’s floodplain system is the largest and most biodiverse on Earth. Although forests are crucial to the ecological integrity of floodplains, our understanding of their species composition and how this may differ from surrounding forest types is still far too limited, particularly as changing inundation regimes begin to reshape floodplain tree...
Understanding which species will be extirpated in the aftermath of large‐scale human disturbance is critical to mitigating biodiversity loss, particularly in hyperdiverse tropical biomes. Deforestation is the strongest driver of contemporary local extinctions in tropical forests but may occur at different tempos. The 2 most extensive tropical fores...
Ambitious biodiversity goals to protect 30% or more of the Earth’s surface by 2030 (30x30) require strategic near-term targets. To define areas that must be protected to prevent the most likely and imminent extinctions, we propose Conservation Imperatives—16,825 unprotected sites harboring rare and threatened species and spanning ~164 Mha of the te...
Aim: Amazonia hosts more tree species from numerous evolutionary lineages, both young and ancient, than any other biogeographic region. Previous studies have shown that tree lineages colonized multiple edaphic environments and dispersed widely across Amazonia, leading to a hypothesis, which we test, that lineages should not be strongly associated w...
Several hundred species are hunted for wild meat in the tropics, supporting the diets, customs, and livelihoods of millions of people. However, unsustainable hunting is one of the most urgent threats to wildlife and ecosystems worldwide and has serious ramifications for people whose subsistence and income are tied to wild meat. Over the past 18 yea...
Given the ongoing environmental degradation from local to global scales, it is fundamental to develop more efficient means of gathering data on species and ecosystems. Local ecological knowledge, in which local communities can consistently provide information on the status of animal species over time, has been shown to be effective. Several studies...
Agricultural expansion has markedly reduced forests and reconfigured landscapes. These changes incur a well‐known detrimental impact on the biodiversity of local forest patches, but the effects on species persistence in entire landscapes comprised of multiple patches are debated. Using data from ants collected in the Amazonian deforestation arc in...
Community-based conservation has gained traction in the Brazilian Amazon due to its potential in combining territorial protection, local well-being, and biodiversity conservation. Here, we conducted an innovative assessment of the effective protection footprint of the largest community-based fisheries conservation arrangement in the Amazon. Local c...
Background
Soil animal communities include more than 40 higher-order taxa, representing over 23% of all described species. These animals have a wide range of feeding sources and contribute to several important soil functions and ecosystem services. Although many studies have assessed macroinvertebrate communities in Brazil, few of them have been pu...
Trees structure the Earth’s most biodiverse ecosystem, tropical forests. The vast number of tree species presents a formidable challenge to understanding these forests, including their response to environmental change, as very little is known about most tropical tree species. A focus on the common species may circumvent this challenge. Here we inve...
A new species from the southwest Brazilian Amazon, Isocopris rossinii Arias-Buriticá, Bach, and Vaz-de-Mello, new species, is described along with a diagnosis, illustrations, and discussion of its taxonomic position in the genus. This new species is readily distinguished by a deep depression in the frons, a large and trapezoidal ventral clypeal pro...
Coats-of-arms representing municipal counties express local patterns of rural economics, natural resource and land use, features of the natural capital, and the cultural heritage of either aborigines or colonists. We reconstruct the subnational economic and political timeline of the world's largest tropical country using municipal coats-of-arms to...
The Brazilian state of Acre is located in the southwestern Amazon and it is characterized by a humid tropical forest vegetation that covers plains and mountains. Up to this point, the composition of termite species in the state is not known. The aim of this study was to provide a checklist of termite species or recognizable taxonomic units for the...
The fragmentation and degradation of otherwise continuous natural landscapes pose serious threats to the health of animal populations, consequently impairing their fitness and survival. While most fragmentation ecology studies focus on habitat remnants embedded withinn terrestrial matrices, the effects of true insularization remains poorly understo...
Palingonalia Young, 1977 is a small, poorly known genus of Neotropical leafhoppers comprising only three described species. Here, we describe for the first time the female genitalia of Palingonalia and provided the first record of P. subta Freytag & Vargas, 2007 from Amazonas state, Brazil. Additionally, a distributional map for the genus, discussi...
ARTICLE Mapping density, diversity and species-richness of the Amazon tree flora Using 2.046 botanically-inventoried tree plots across the largest tropical forest on Earth, we mapped tree species-diversity and tree species-richness at 0.1-degree resolution, and investigated drivers for diversity and richness. Using only location, stratified by fore...
Soil animal communities include more than 40 higher-order taxa, representing over 23% of all described species. These animals have a wide range of feeding sources and contribute to several important soil functions and ecosystem services. Although many studies have assessed macroinvertebrate communities in Brazil, few of them have been published in...
The conversion of native vegetation into agricultural areas is arguably the key driver of biodiversity declines globally. We assessed the responses of dung beetle assemblages (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae: Scarabaeinae) to the effects of native vegetation conversion into soybean monoculture in different vegetation domains (Amazonian forest, scrubland s...
Agricultural commodity production is one the main drivers of deforestation in Legal Brazilian Amazonia resulting in a deforested and/or fragmented landscape formed by forest remnants of different sizes and shape embedded within the agricultural matrix. As an ecosystem engineer and a crucial seed predator, white-lipped peccaries (Tayassu pecari) pla...
Indigenous societies are known to have occupied the Amazon basin for more than 12,000 years, but the scale of their influence on Amazonian forests remains uncertain. We report the discovery, using LIDAR (light detection and ranging) information from across the basin, of 24 previously undetected
pre-Columbian earthworks beneath the forest canopy. Mo...
Ambitious biodiversity goals to protect 30% or more of the Earth’s surface by 2030 to prevent the most likely and imminent extinctions require strategic near-term targets. We propose Conservation Imperatives, spanning 164 Mha across 16,825 unprotected sites harboring rare and threatened species. These sites should be prioritized for conservation ac...
Agricultural expansion has markedly reduced forests and reconfigured landscapes. These changes incur a well-known detrimental impact on the biodiversity of local forest patches, but the effects on species persistence at entire landscapes comprised of multiple patches are debated. We investigated how regional diversity is affected by habitat loss, f...
Cropland intensification in tropical regions is usually associated with agricultural commodity expansion that penalizes the species diversity and environmental services of natural ecosystems. However, the extent to which cropland expansion affects the reproductive functional diversity of crop arrangements remains poorly investigated. Here we examin...
Graphical abstract Highlights d Ecological metadata were compiled for 7,694 sites across the Brazilian Amazon d Accessibility and proximity to research facilities influenced research probability d Knowledge gaps are greater in uplands than in wetlands and aquatic habitats d Undersampled areas overlap predicted hotspots of climate change and defores...
Mega dams result in habitat loss and fragmentation in lowland tropical forests, compromising the diversity and ecosystem functioning in remnant habitat islands. We investigated the structure of aerial insectivorous bat assemblages within insular forest patches created by a vast ~30-year-old hydropower reservoir and adjacent mainland continuous fore...
The purported sustainability of sustainable-use reserves (SURs) has been questioned in recent decades due to anthropogenic disturbance, including widespread game hunting. A fuller understanding of the drivers of harvest- induced game population changes in SURs is needed to inform this debate. We deployed 720 camera traps around 100 local communitie...
Aim
Although many studies have described spatial patterns along elevational gradients, only a handful have investigated their temporal dynamics, which remain poorly understood. Here we investigate patterns of frog spatiotemporal diversity (Anuran: Amphibia) along a subtropical elevational gradient, and assess the importance of temperature in explai...
For more than three decades, major efforts in sampling and analyzing tree diversity
in South America have focused almost exclusively on trees with stems of at least 10
and 2.5 cm diameter, showing highest species diversity in the wetter western and
northern Amazon forests. By contrast, little attention has been paid to patterns and
drivers of diver...
There is ongoing debate concerning whether there exists a generalizable effect of land-use change on biodiversity and consequently zoonotic disease risk. Strong data informing this debate is sparse because ecological and sampling complexities make it challenging to establish direct links between vertebrate hosts (and non-hosts), vectors, and pathog...
In many disturbed terrestrial landscapes, a subset of native generalist vertebrates thrives. The population trends of these disturbance-tolerant species may be driven by multiple factors, including habitat preferences, foraging opportunities (including crop raiding or human refuse), lower mortality when their predators are persecuted (the 'human sh...
Selective logging is one of the largest drivers of tropical forest degradation. While logged forests often retain high alpha‐diversity of tropical trees at local spatial scales, understanding how selective logging impacts tree beta‐diversity and community composition across far larger spatial scales remains a key unresolved question.
We leverage la...
Species relative abundance (SRA) is an essential attribute of biotic communities, which can provide an accurate description of community structure. However, the sampling method used may have a direct influence on SRA quantification, since the use of at-tractants (e.g., baits, light, and pheromones) can introduce additional sources of variation in t...
Tropical forest fragmentation is expected to result in the loss of forest-dependent species (‘losers’) and proliferation of disturbance-tolerant species (‘winners’). Here, we use multi-species occupancy modelling to quantify the effects of fragmentation on Amazonian dung beetles at the species and community level. We investigate the relationship be...
Apex predators typically affect the distribution of key soil and vegetation nutrients through the heterogeneous deposition of prey carcasses and excreta, leading to a nutrient concentration in a hotspot. The exact role of central-place foragers, such as tropical raptors, in nutrient deposition and cycling, is not yet known. We investigated whether...
Zero hunger is one of the most challenging Sustainable Development Goals, one to which Latin America has demonstrated commitment through socioeconomic policies that target the most vulnerable people. However, political instability in Brazil, a major Latin American economy, has been responsible for retrogressive changes in social and environmental p...
The Neotropical region hosts 4225 freshwater fish species, ranking first among the world's most diverse regions for freshwater fishes. Our NEOTROPICAL FRESHWATER FISHES data set is the first to produce a large‐scale Neotropical freshwater fish inventory, covering the entire Neotropical region from Mexico and the Caribbean in the north to the southe...
In a time of rapid global change, the question of what determines patterns in species abundance distribution remains a priority for understanding the complex dynamics of ecosystems. The constrained maximization of information entropy provides a framework for the understanding of such complex systems dynamics by a quantitative analysis of important...
Jaguars (Panthera onca) exert critical top-down control over large vertebrates across the Neotropics. Yet, this iconic species have been declining due to multiple threats, such as habitat loss and hunting, which are rapidly increasing across the New World tropics. Based on geospatial layers, we extracted socio-environmental variables for 447 protec...
The rise in species richness with area is one of the best-studied patterns in ecology. Yet, little is known about the spatial scaling of alternate dimensions of diversity. Here, we provide empirical evidence for a relationship between the richness of acoustic traits emanating from the landscape, or soundscape richness, and the island area, which we...
Building conservation research capacity (CRC), especially in developing countries, has long been proposed to halt and reverse biodiversity loss. Yet, a global evaluation of CRC and its impact on biodiversity conservation is still lacking. Here, by analyzing over 177,000 scientific papers frommajor conservation journals published after 2000, we deri...
The Amazon is one of the most diverse biomes around the globe, currently threatened by economic and industrial development and climate change. Large mammals are keystone species, playing an important role in ecosystem structure and function as ecological engineers, while being highly susceptible to deforestation, habitat degradation , and human exp...