Fernanda da Silva Santos

• PhD - Ecology
• Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi - MPEG

Tropical forests hold most of Earth’s biodiversity and a higher concentration of threatened mammals than other biomes. As a result, some mammal species persist almost exclusively in protected areas, often within extensively transformed and heavily populated landscapes. Other species depend on remaining remote forested areas with sparse human popula...

Understanding how predators and their prey coexist in space and time is a core interest in ecology. Vast amounts of photographic detection data are now available from a growing number of camera‐trap studies worldwide. These data boost our ability to study an elusive yet important topic in ecology: species interactions in space and time. Here, we in...

The negative effects of land-use changes on biodiversity significantly contribute to climate change. Primates are among the animals most affected by these changes, because of their high dependence on forest cover where a lack of forest connectivity can limit their dispersal and segregate their populations. In this sense, protected areas (PAs) are c...

Changes in lunar illumination alter the balance of risks and opportunities for animals, influencing activity patterns and species interactions. We examined if and how terrestrial mammals respond to the lunar cycle in some of the darkest places: the floors of tropical forests. We analysed long-term camera trapping data on 86 mammal species from 17 p...

Aim Tropical regions harbour over half of the world's mammals and birds, but how their communities have assembled over evolutionary timescales remains unclear. To compare eco‐evolutionary assembly processes between tropical mammals and birds, we tested how hypotheses concerning niche conservatism, environmental stability, environmental heterogeneit...

Reliable maps of species distributions are fundamental for biodiversity research and conservation. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) range maps are widely recognized as authoritative representations of species’ geographic limits, yet they might not always align with actual occurrence data. In recent area of habitat (AOH) map...

Changes in lunar illumination alter the balance of risks and opportunities for animals at night, influencing activity patterns and species interactions. Our knowledge about behavioral responses to moonlight is incomplete, yet it can serve to assess and predict how species respond to environmental changes such as light pollution or loss of canopy co...

Protected areas (PAs) play a vital role in wildlife conservation. Nonetheless there is concern and uncertainty regarding how and at what spatial scales anthropogenic stressors influence the occurrence dynamics of wildlife populations inside PAs. Here we assessed how anthropogenic stressors influence occurrence dynamics of 159 mammal species in 16 t...

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...

An animal’s daily use of time (their “diel activity”) reflects their adaptations, requirements, and interactions, yet we know little about the underlying processes governing diel activity within and among communities. Here we examine whether community-level activity patterns differ among biogeographic regions, and explore the roles of top-down vers...

The spatial aggregation of species pairs often increases with the ecological similarity of the species involved. However, the way in which environmental conditions and anthropogenic activity affect the relationship between spatial aggregation and ecological similarity remains unknown despite the potential for spatial associations to affect species...

The Amazon forest has the highest biodiversity on Earth. However, information on Amazonian vertebrate diversity is still deficient and scattered across the published, peer‐reviewed, and gray literature and in unpublished raw data. Camera traps are an effective non‐invasive method of surveying vertebrates, applicable to different scales of time and...

The Amazon forest has the highest biodiversity on Earth. However, information on Amazonian vertebrate diversity is still deficient and scattered across the published, peer-reviewed, and gray literature and in unpublished raw data. Camera traps are an effective non-invasive method of surveying vertebrates, applicable to different scales of time and...

The structure of forest mammal communities appears surprisingly consistent across the continental tropics, presumably due to convergent evolution in similar environments. Whether such consistency extends to mammal occupancy, despite variation in species characteristics and context, remains unclear. Here we ask whether we can predict occupancy patte...

Most animals follow distinct daily activity patterns reflecting their adaptations1, requirements, and interactions2-4. Specific communities provide specific opportunities and constraints to their members that further shape these patterns3,4. Here, we ask whether community-level diel activity patterns among long-separated biogeographic regions diffe...

The establishment of protected areas (PAs) is a central strategy for global biodi- versity conservation. While the role of PAs in protecting habitat has been high- lighted, their effectiveness at protecting mammal communities remains unclear. We analyzed a global dataset from over 8671 camera traps in 23 countries on four continents that detected 3...

In a scenario where escalating human activities lead to several environmental changes and, consequently, affect mammal abundance and distribution, β-diversity may increase due to differences among sites. Using the ecological uniqueness approach, we analyzed β-diversity patterns of ground-dwelling mammal communities recorded through comprehensive ca...

A variety of factors can affect the biodiversity of tropical mammal communities, but their relative importance and directionality remain uncertain. Previous global investigations of mammal functional diversity have relied on range maps instead of observational data to determine community composition. We test the effects of species pools, habitat he...

Mammalian carnivores are considered a key group in maintaining ecological health and can indicate potential ecological integrity in landscapes where they occur. Carnivores also hold high conservation value and their habitat requirements can guide management and conservation plans. The order Carnivora has 84 species from 8 families in the Neotropica...

The persistent high deforestation rate and fragmentation of the Amazon forests are the main threats to their biodiversity. To anticipate and mitigate these threats, it is important to understand and predict how species respond to the rapidly changing landscape. The short-eared dog Atelocynus microtis is the only Amazon-endemic canid and one of the...

We investigated short-eared dog habitat associations on two spatial scales. First, we used the largest record database ever compiled for short-eared dogs in combination with species distribution models to map species habitat suitability, estimate its distribution range and predict shifts in species distribution in response to predicted deforestatio...

Camera traps deployed in grids or stratified random designs are a well‐established survey tool for wildlife but there has been little evaluation of study design parameters. We used an empirical subsampling approach involving 2225 camera deployments run at 41 study areas around the world to evaluate three aspects of camera trap study design (number...

Activity range ‐ the amount of time spent active per day ‐ is a fundamental aspect contributing to the optimization process by which animals achieve energetic balance. Based on their size and the nature of their diet, theoretical expectations are that larger carnivores need more time active to fulfil their energetic needs than do smaller ones and a...

The understanding of global diversity patterns has benefitted from a focus on functional traits and how they relate to variation in environmental conditions among assemblages. Distant communities in similar environments often share characteristics, and for tropical forest mammals, this functional trait convergence has been demonstrated at coarse sc...

Xenarthrans—anteaters, sloths, and armadillos—have essential functions for ecosystem maintenance, such as insect control and nutrient cycling, playing key roles as ecosystem engineers. Because of habitat loss and fragmentation, hunting pressure, and conflicts with domestic dogs, these species have been threatened locally, regionally, or even across...

Xenarthrans—anteaters, sloths, and armadillos—have essential functions for ecosystem maintenance, such as insect control and nutrient cycling, playing key roles as ecosystem engineers. Because of habitat loss and fragmentation, hunting pressure, and conflicts with domestic dogs, these species have been threatened locally, regionally, or even across...

Carnivores have long been used as model organisms to examine mechanisms that allow coexistence among ecologically similar species. Interactions between carnivores, including competition and predation, comprise important processes regulating local community structure and diversity. We use data from an intensive camera-trapping monitoring program acr...

Model selection analysis for occupancy (Ψ) and detection probability (p) used to evaluate the effect of time (sampling period) and study site on the habitat use of three sympatric felids, the jaguar (Panthera onca), puma (Puma concolor) and ocelot (Leopardus pardalis) in Neotropical forests. (DOCX)

Prey species list and relative abundance index (images/100 ctdays) of small (< 15 Kg) and large prey (> 15Kg) of carnivores in our eight Neotropical study sites. (DOCX)

Spearman’s rank correlation to test for collinearity among continuous covariates (ρ> 0.70). (DOCX)

Coefficient of overlap (Δ1) with confidence intervals (CI lower/CI upper) and Watson’s two-sample test (two-sample U2) performed on pairwise comparisons between study sites. (DOCX)

Single-species detection models used to evaluate the effects of covariates on the detection probability (p) of three sympatric felids, the jaguar (Panthera onca), puma (Puma concolor) and ocelot (Leopardus pardalis) in Neotropical forests. Detection probability was modelled as a function of elevation, NDVI, study site (site), large prey availabilit...

Single-species occupancy models used to evaluate the effects of elevation (Elev.), distance to nearest water source (water), NDVI (ndvi), small prey’s availability (small) and large prey’s availability (large) on the habitat use of jaguar (Panthera onca), puma (Puma concolor) and ocelot (Leopardus pardalis) in Neotropical forests. (DOCX)

Coefficient of overlap (Δ) with confidence intervals (CI lower/CI upper) and Watson’s two-sample test (two-sample U2) performed on pairwise comparisons between cat species per site. (DOCX)

Single-species occupancy models used to evaluate best habitat factors and species interactions. Occupancy probability was modelled as a function of elevation (Elev.), distance to water (water), NDVI (ndvi), small prey’s availability (small), large prey’s availability (large) and occupancy estimates of each cat species (jaguar, puma and ocelot). (DO...

Differences in the daily activity level (i. e., proportion of hours per day that an animal is active), standard errors (SE), Wald test (W) of Neotropical cats across the eight study sites (*Significant difference <0.05). (DOCX)

Extinction rates in the Anthropocene are three orders of magnitude higher than background and disproportionately occur in the tropics, home of half the world’s species. Despite global efforts to combat tropical species extinctions, lack of high-quality, objective information on mammals and birds, representing 244 species from 15 tropical forest pro...

Population occupancy status. By class (a), IUCN category (b), body mass (c), guild (d), landscape type (e), and hunting status (f). Bar height illustrates the relative frequencies of each occupancy status, and bar width illustrates the sample size. Asterisks indicate a significantly different occupancy status. See S2 Table for numerical data. (TIF)

Occupancy status by TEAM site and guild. The proportion of populations with decreasing (orange), increasing (purple), unknown (gray), or stable (white) occupancy for each guild at each site; n = 511 populations. See S1 Table for site information corresponding to the three-letter site codes. Bar length illustrates the proportion of each occupancy st...

Pairwise relationships between continuous site-level variables. Upper triangular portion of the matrix contains Pearson correlation coefficients, with the font size proportional to the correlation coefficient. Lower triangular portions of the matrix contain pairwise scatter plots to illustrate associations. “PAsize” is the log of the size of the pr...

Summary information for TEAM sites. Including the full site name, site code, country, number of years of camera trap data, number of populations monitored by TEAM, percent of populations for each occupancy status, percent of monitored populations that were reported as hunted or not hunted, landscape connectivity, camera trap sampling area, protecte...

Population occupancy status and monitoring duration. Frequency histogram of population trends based on the number of years of camera trap data (3–4 y [n = 8 sites, 270 populations], 5 y [n = 4 sites, 141 populations], or 6 y or more [n = 3 sites, 100 populations]). While the variance in occupancy trends decreased with additional years of data, the...

Population occupancy over time. Each line depicts the trend of a particular species population monitored by TEAM. Color depicts significantly decreasing (orange), significantly increasing (purple), unknown (gray), or stable (black) occupancy trends. See S2 Table for numerical data. (TIF)

Forest cover and landscape classification. (a) Green represents forest cover and brown represents non-forested cover for the ZOI of each protected area (Materials and Methods). Bold text is the code for each TEAM site. x- and y-axis labels are degrees latitude and longitude, respectively. (b) The UPGMA cluster analysis was based on two measures of...

Supplementary results. (DOCX)

AIC comparison of univariate logistic regression models. For (a) the proportion of decreasing occupancy status populations per site and (b) the proportion of increasing occupancy status populations per site. For both decreasing and increasing occupancy status proportions, the null models with no covariates performed better (delta AIC > 2) than all...

Monitored populations and associated attribute data. The following attributes are listed for each population: Class, Order, Family, Species, IUCN Red List Status (TH = Threatened, NT = Near Threatened, VU = Vulnerable, LC = Least Concern, DD = Data Deficient), Body Mass, Guild (Omnivore, Carnivore, Herbivore, Insectivore), Occupancy Coefficient Slo...

Numerical data for Fig 2A. (CSV)

R code. (PDF)

Numerical data for Fig 2C. (CSV)

Numerical data for S7 Fig. (CSV)

The high species richness of tropical forests has long been recognized, yet there remains substantial uncertainty regarding the actual number of tropical tree species. Using a pantropical tree inventory database from closed canopy forests, consisting of 657,630 trees belonging to 11,371 species, we use a fitted value of Fisher’s alpha and an approx...

The high species richness of tropical forests has long been recognized, yet there remains substantial uncertainty regarding the actual number of tropical tree species. Using a pantropical tree inventory database from closed canopy forests, consisting of 657,630 trees belonging to 11,371 species, we use a fitted value of Fisher's alpha and an approx...

The high species richness of tropical forests has long been recognized, yet there remains substantial uncertainty regarding the actual number of tropical tree species. Using a pantropical tree inventory database from closed canopy forests, consisting of 657,630 trees belonging to 11,371 species, we use a fitted value of Fisher’s alpha and an approx...

Between April 2008 and May 2009, studies on the species richness, composition and relative abundance of the medium and large sized mammals were carried out in the Urucu basin (Brazilian Amazon). The survey was conducted using line transect sampling method, active search for signs and camera-traps. A total of 41 species of 17 families and eight orde...

Epífitas são plantas que se desenvolvem sobre outras plantas sem parasitá-las. Pouco se conhece sobre este grupo de plantas na região, tornando-se importantes estudos deste caráter. Desta forma o objetivo desse trabalho foi caracterizar a composição florística do componente epifítico vascular das formações florestais ocorrentes no local. A área alv...