Elisa Barreto

Federal University of Goiás | UFG · Departamento de Ecologia

In the Neotropics, a fascinating pollination system is that starring by hummingbirds, the most specialised group of nectar-feeding birds. They visit a great number of colorful flowers to fuel their little bodies constantly with nectar. In our study, we evaluated the role of morphological and nectar traits in shaping plant-hummingbird interaction ne...

Species traits greatly influence interactions between plants and pollinators where floral nectar is the primary energy source fostering this mutualism. However, very little is known about how nectar traits mediate interactions in pollination networks compared with morphological traits. Here, we evaluated the role of morphological and nectar traits...

Understanding how species extinctions affect communities of interacting species is an important challenge of ecology. The presence of unfeasible interactions, termed forbidden links, due to physiological or morphological barriers, is likely to decrease the plasticity of interaction networks, affecting their robustness to species extinctions. Howeve...

Plant–hummingbird interactions are considered a classic example of coevolution, a process in which mutually dependent species influence each other’s evolution. Plants depend on hummingbirds for pollination, whereas hummingbirds rely on nectar for food. As a step towards understanding coevolution, this review focuses on the macroevolutionary consequ...

Mutualistic interactions, such as plant–mycorrhizal or plant–pollinator interactions, are widespread in ecological communities and frequently exploited by cheaters, species that profit from interactions without providing benefits in return. Cheating usually negatively affects the fitness of the individuals that are cheated on, but the effects of ch...

Speciation rates vary greatly among taxa and regions and are shaped by both biotic and abiotic factors. However, the relative importance and interactions of these factors are not well understood. Here we investigate the potential drivers of speciation rates in South American freshwater fishes, the most diverse continental vertebrate fauna, by exami...

Climate’s effect on global biodiversity is typically viewed through the lens of temperature, humidity and resulting ecosystem productivity1,2,3,4,5,6. However, it is not known whether biodiversity depends solely on these climate conditions, or whether the size and fragmentation of these climates are also crucial. Here we shift the common perspectiv...

How traits affect speciation is a long-standing question in evolution. We investigate whether speciation rates are affected by the traits themselves or by the rates of their evolution, in hummingbirds, a clade with great variation in speciation rates, morphology and ecological niches. Further, we test two opposing hypotheses, postulating that speci...

Mutualistic interactions, such as plant-mycorrhizal or plant-pollinator interactions, are widespread in ecological communities and frequently exploited by cheaters, species that profit from interactions without providing benefits in return. Cheating usually negatively affects the fitness of the individuals that are cheated on, but the effects of ch...

Motivation Climate change plays an important role in the generation and maintenance of biodiversity by driving processes such as diversification and range shifts. As a result, biodiversity patterns are often found to carry the imprints of palaeoclimatic changes. However, we still know little about the spatial and temporal variation in climate over...

Sloths and anteaters form the monophyletic order Pilosa, which is currently represented by only 16 extant species distributed exclusively in the Neotropics. This present‐day low species richness is an inheritance of the Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions, where over 65 Pilosa species known from the fossil record went extinct. The large number of sp...

Reduction of functional diversity (FD) and phylogenetic diversity (PD) likely affects ecosystem functions and reduces the potential of communities to respond to changes, such as climate change. Mutualistic interactions are essential for maintaining diversity, but their role has largely been ignored in conservation planning. We propose using a speci...

Insular biodiversity is expected to be regulated differently than continental biota, but their determinants remain to be quantified at a global scale. We evaluated the importance of physical, environmental and historical factors on mammal richness and endemism across 5592 islands worldwide. We fitted generalized linear and mixed models to accommoda...

Andean forests, a hotspot of biodiversity, have suffered extensive fragmentation, yet we have little understanding of how this process has affected biodiversity. We surveyed bird communities across a gradient of fragment sizes (10-170 ha) and a continuous forest reference site in the Colombian Western Andes. Using a multi-species occupancy model to...

Aim We aimed to dissect the spatial variation of the direct and indirect effects of climate and productivity on global species richness of terrestrial tetrapods. Location Global. Time period Present. Major taxa studied Terrestrial tetrapods. Methods We used a geographically weighted path analysis to estimate and map the direct and indirect effe...

The evolutionary stability of fruit-eating birds is linked to their role in dispersing seeds

Aim The Island Rule—that is, the tendency for body size to decrease in large mammals and increase in small mammals on islands has been commonly evaluated through macroecological or macroevolutionary, pattern-orientated approaches, which generally fail to model the microevolutionary processes driving either dwarfing or gigantism. Here, we seek to id...

Invasive species can significantly affect native species when their niches are similar. Ecological and morphological similarities between the invasive Australian palm, Archontophoenix cunninghamiana, and the native palm from the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, Euterpe edulis, suggest that they have similar environmental requirements and functional roles...

We describe the development of the “Paleoclimate PLASIM-GENIE (Planet Simulator–Grid-Enabled Integrated Earth system model) emulator” PALEO-PGEM and its application to derive a downscaled high-resolution spatio-temporal description of the climate of the last 5×106 years. The 5×106-year time frame is interesting for a range of paleo-environmental qu...

Aim Explore the spatial variation of the relationships between species richness (SR), phylogenetic diversity (PD) and environmental factors to infer the possible mechanisms underlying patterns of diversity in different regions of the globe. Location Global. Time period Present day. Major taxa studied Terrestrial mammals. Methods We used a hexag...

Aim Tall and structurally complex forests can provide ample habitat and niche space for climbing plants, supporting high liana species richness. We test to what extent canopy height (as a proxy of 3‐D habitat structure), climate and soil interact to determine species richness in the largest clade of Neotropical lianas. We expect that the effect of...

Although many hypotheses have been proposed to explain why humans speak so many languages and why languages are unevenly distributed across the globe, the factors that shape geographical patterns of cultural and linguistic diversity remain poorly understood. Prior research has tended to focus on identifying universal predictors of language diversit...

Explaining how heterogeneous spatial patterns of species diversity emerge is one of the most fascinating questions of biogeography. One of the great challenges is revealing the mechanistic effect of environmental variables on diversity. Correlative analyses indicate that productivity is associated with taxonomic, phylogenetic, and functional divers...

Key innovations are organismal traits that trigger adaptive radiation and lineage diversification. The wide range of anuran reproductive strategies from aquatic to terrestrial modes are potential key innovations. One such strategy is the foam nest, a structure with multiple functions that originated independently several times in different continen...

Key innovations are organismal traits that trigger adaptive radiation and lineage diversification. The wide range of anuran reproductive strategies from aquatic to terrestrial modes are potential key innovations. One such strategy is the foam nest, a structure with multiple functions that originated independently several times in different continen...

Background Traditionally, the evolution of terrestrial reproduction in anurans from ancestors that bred in water has been accepted in the literature. Still, the existence of intermediate stages of water dependency, such as species that lay eggs close to water (e.g., in burrows) instead of in bodies of water, supports the hypothesis of an ordered an...

One of the main threats affecting the Cerrado biome is the long-term use of environment resources by human activities. Brazilian current legislation requires the implementation of certain procedures to recover degraded areas. These procedures predict the study the ecological mechanisms associated to recolonization of disturbed areas. This study was...

A diversidade de anfíbios no Cerrado é ameaçada principalmente pelo aumento das atividades antrópicas. A legislação vigente exige de empreendimentos potencialmente impactantes a implantação de programas ambientais que incluem a recuperação de áreas degradadas e o estudo dos mecanismos ecológicos associados à recolonização de áreas alteradas. Os obj...

Certas espécies de plantas do gênero Erythroxylum (Erythroxylaceae) são utilizados na medicina tradicional para tratar a amenorréia, hemorragia, distúrbios renais, gripe, sinusite, chateado e estômago, para combater a fadiga e a sensação de fome, e como estimulantes. Extratos de Erythroxylum sp mostraram atividade biológica, tais como antiinflamató...

Palavras-chave: Rubiaceae, Erythroxylaceae, Azul de tripano, Ensaio MTT, K562. A leucemia mielóide crônica é uma doença mieloproliferativa clonal das células pluripotentes da medula óssea e constitui 14% de todas as leucemias. O tratamento dessa doença não é considerado satisfatório, assim como em muitas outras patologias especialmente nas áreas de...

Palavras-chave: Galianthe ramosa, atividade citotóxica, Azul de Tripano, viabilidade celular, Células K-562 As plantas são consideradas fontes importantes de substâncias ativas responsáveis pela ação de medicamentos ou como modelo para a síntese de novos fármacos. Medicamentos importantes utilizados no combate de diversos tipos de cânceres foram ob...