Danielle Storck-Tonon

• PhD - Entomology
• Visiting Professor at Universidade do Estado de Mato Grosso

Tropical forest canopies are the biosphere’s most concentrated atmospheric interface for carbon, water and energy1,2. However, in most Earth System Models, the diverse and heterogeneous tropical forest biome is represented as a largely uniform ecosystem with either a singular or a small number of fixed canopy ecophysiological properties³. This situ...

Motivation The accelerated and widespread conversion of once continuous ecosystems into fragmented landscapes has driven ecological research to understand the response of biodiversity to local (fragment size) and landscape (forest cover and fragmentation) changes. This information has important theoretical and applied implications, but is still far...

Agriculture has been globally responsible for biodiversity decay. Given that bees are key pollinators, their diversity reduction can affect biodiversity conservation and agricultural production. Although agricultural matrices have been reported as pervasive to bees, these effects are not always consistent and may vary according to evaluated paramet...

Traditional cocoa agroforests of southern Bahia in Brazil, locally known as “cabrucas”, are highly relevant for sheltering forest species, being thus recognized as a biodiversity-friendly agricultural system. However, despite their role in biodiversity conservation, little is known about the ability of cocoa agroforests to maintain social wasp asse...

Context The expansion of agricultural lands threatens biodiversity maintenance across the tropics. Although some agroforestry systems may be biodiversity-friendly, their conservation value likely depends on the landscape and regional contexts in which they are embedded—a poorly tested hypothesis. Objectives We assessed the conservation value of sh...

1. The replacement of native habitats by monocultures has led to the loss of insect biodiversity, including beetles. 2. In an attempt to minimize this loss, Brazilian legislation requires farmers to conserve a proportion of farmland as a Legal Reserve. 3. In this study, we investigated the decay of similarity in beetle communities of soybean monocu...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Understorey herbs form a diverse and understudied plant assemblage in tropical forests. Although several studies and research teams have long been dedicated to the study of this conspicuous vegetation component in Amazonia, no effort to unify the data has been undertaken to date. In contrast to trees and other life forms for which major data compil...

ACTA AMAZONICA CITE AS: André, T.; Moulatlet, G.M.; Almeida, T.E.; Alverga, P.P.P.; Boelter, C.R.; Drucker, D.P.; Silva, J.G.; Linares-Palomino, R.; Lopes, M.A.; Magalhães, J.L.L.; Manzatto, A.G. et al. 2023. HERBase: A collection of understorey herb vegetation plots from Amazonia. Acta Amazonica 53: 114-121. ABSTRACT Understorey herbs form a diver...

O nematoide das lesões radiculares tem causado danos econômicos crescentes nas culturas de explorações agropecuárias no Brasil, especialmente na região Centro-Oeste. Objetivou-se neste trabalho conhecer a distribuição do nematoide das lesões radiculares, Pratylenchus spp., no Estado de Mato Grosso, possibilitando conhecer as localidades com maior c...

Social wasps play an important role in controlling agricultural pests. The present study aimed to investigate the differences in abundance, species richness and composition of social wasps (Vespidae: Polistinae) between a Cerrado legal reserve, edge and agricultural matrix in an agricultural farm in Mato Grosso, Brazil. We delimited three transects...

Deforestation and fragmentation are pervasive drivers of biodiversity loss, but how they scale up to entire landscapes remains poorly understood. Here, we apply species-habitat networks based on species co-occurrences to test the effects of insular fragmentation on multiple taxa-medium-large mammals, small nonvolant mammals, lizards, understory bir...

To preserve biodiversity, the Brazilian law postulates that rural properties must keep a percentage of native vegetation cover, denominated as “Legal Reserve” (LR). Recent political efforts are being made to disoblige the farmer to keep the LRs. In this study we evaluated the role of LRs in ensuring the ant biodiversity on LRs and soybean plantatio...

Increasing food production while preserving natural ecosystem services linked to native biodiversity is one of the most important societal challenges in the 21st-century. Natural pollination performed by bees significantly increases yields even in crops that do not strictly depend on animal pollination, such as soybean. However, several factors, su...

The predatory activities of Apiomerus duckei Costa Lima, Seabra & Hathaway, 1951, Apiomerus pilipes (Fabricius, 1787) and Apiomerus luctuosus Costa Lima, Seabra & Hathaway, 1951 (Hemiptera: Reduviidae: Harpactorinae: Apiomerini) on orchid bees (Hymenoptera: Apidae: Apinae: Euglossini) in odoriferous traps in the influence area of Santo Antônio Hydr...

Tropical forests have been rapidly deforested and degradation worldwide has outpaced biodiversity field sampling. No study to date has assessed the effects of insular habitats induced by hydroelectric dams on Amazonian understory plants. Fern community responses to anthropogenic effects on tropical forest islands can be revealed at a faster pace by...

Global initiatives to reforest degraded areas have intensified in recent years, in an attempt to reverse the environmental impacts of habitat loss on species and ecosystem provided by them. However, the effectiveness of such reforestation initiatives in re-establishing biodiversity is still poorly understood. Here, we test how reforestation type an...

• Understanding the processes that shape biotic interactions within biological communities helps us to develop strategies for the establishment of ecological communities and to rehabilitate the functionality of degraded environments. • We evaluated the functional diversity of cavity‐nesting bees and wasps and their interaction networks established...

The species–area relationship (SAR) describes a range of related phenomena that are fundamental to the study of biogeography, macroecology and community ecology. While the subject of ongoing debate for a century, surprisingly, no previous book has focused specifically on the SAR. This volume addresses this shortfall by providing a synthesis of the...

• Mega hydroelectric dams have become one of the main drivers of habitat loss in tropical forests, converting large tracts of pristine forests into isolated forest islands. Understanding how biodiversity cope with landscape modification in these archipelagic landscapes is of paramount importance to assess the environmental consequences of dam infra...

Ants and dung beetles are widely used in monitoring biodiversity and are considered excellent environmental indicators. Although the pitfall trap is the most commonly used method to sample dung beetles and ants in ecological studies, beetles are usually sampled using dung‐baited pitfall traps while ants are sampled using un-baited pitfalls. In the...

Agricultural expansions have major negative impacts on terrestrial biodiversity, directly affecting ecosystem services. Social wasps (Hymenoptera: Vespidae: Polistinae) actively participate in trophic balance in natural ecosystems and biological control of agricultural pests. In this work, we evaluated the richness and composition of social wasps i...

Agricultural landscapes sometimes include natural habitats which can support the ecosystem by enhancing the pollination of crops, thus boosting the productivity. This research was conducted between May and July 2017, in the municipality of Tangará da Serra, Mato Grosso, Brazil, to assess the Cerrado from the perspective of it being a crucial habita...

The creation of mega-hydropower dams inundates vast lowland areas, causing widespread environmental impacts in tropical forest regions. Few studies, however, have taken advantage of these newly fragmented landscapes to examine the effects of habitat insularization on arthropod faunas. Here, we assess how dung beetle assemblages respond to 30 years...

The municipality of Sorriso-MT has become the largest grain producer in the country in the last 40 years, which has caused important economic, social and local changes. Thus, we seek to analyze and understand the dynamics of these transformations. We evaluate the growth of agricultural activity in the Municipality, the reduction of areas of natural...

O Brasil, é o maior produtor e, também, o maior consumidor mundial de maracujá. Com esta demanda e oferta da fruta a agricultura familiar tem na cadeia produtiva do maracujá-azedo um grande potencial para gerar renda e segurança social. A cultura do maracujá no Brasil é favorecida pelo clima tropical e subtropical com luminosidade, volumes hídricos...

The deforestation has led to local loss of species and important ecosystem services performed by them, causing ecological and economic losses. It is proposed that the reforestation of such areas aims to reduce those impacts. However, particularly in the tropics, little is known about the real success of different types of reforestation in the recov...

1. Mega hydroelectric dams have become one of the main drivers of habitat loss in tropical forests, converting large tracts of pristine forests into isolated forest islands. Understanding how biodiversity cope with landscape modification in these archipelagic landscapes is of paramount importance to assess the environmental consequences of dam infr...

Orchid bees are important pollinators in tropical forests. Although studies have already detected effects of habitat loss and forest fragmentation on bee assemblages, little is known about orchid bees in urban forest fragments. The aim of this study was to analyse the influence of forest fragments (size and edge index) and landscape features (fores...

This study aims to evaluate the influence of land use and occupation at diferente scales on the quality of surface water of the Paraguay/Diamantino basin, Mato Grosso State, Brazil. Statistical tests were used to verify if there is a difference between scales at each point. Land use and land occupation analysis was performed using images from the R...

Major hydroelectric dams are among key emergent agents of habitat loss and fragmentation in lowland tropical forests. Orchid bees (Apidae, Euglossini) are one of the most important groups of specialized pollinators of flowering plants in Neotropical forests. Here, we investigate how an entire assemblage of orchid bees responded to the effects of fo...

The aim of this study is to analyze the effects of habitat loss and forest replacement by cattle pasture on the alpha and beta diversity, abundance, biomass and species composition of dung beetles with different dispersal ability. Dung beetles were captured in 19 forest fragments and neighbouring pastures. Forest fragment area ranged from 3.7 to 48...

Bees of the tribe Euglossini are known as orchid-bees. In general, areas with more vegetation cover have greater abundance and diversity of these bees. This study investigated the effects of forest fragmentation on assemblages of the euglossine bees in the region of Rio Branco municipality, State of Acre, and surrounding areas. Ten forest fragments...

This study presents a list of euglossine-bee species collected in the Lago do Silêncio region, municipality of Boca do Acre, in the Brazilian state of Amazonas, southwestern Amazonia. Euglossine males were attracted to odoriferous baits on December 3 and 4, 2004. A total of 234 individuals belonging to four genera and 25 species were collected. Des...

Male orchid bees were collected between December 2005 and September 2006 in 11 forest areas of different sizes in the region of rio Branco, acre, Southwestern amazonia, Brazil. the bees were attracted by 6 aromatic compounds and collected by insect nets and scent baited traps. a total of 3,675 males of Euglossina in 4 genera and 36 species were col...