
Giselda DuriganInstituto de Pesquisas Ambientais - Governo do Estado de São Paulo
Giselda Durigan
Doctor of Philosophy
About
227
Publications
156,317
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Introduction
I am an ecologist working on tropical grasslands, savannas and forests. My researches have been mostly about ecological applications aiming at conservation and restoration of those ecosystems. That includes fire ecology and management, ecology and control of plant invasions, drivers of changes in structure and composition of plant communities, hydrological processes related to vegetation, adaptive management of ecosystems undergoing restoration, and restoration ecology. Recently, tropical grasslands have been my major interest, because I believe they are the most threatened and poorly known among the tropical ecosystems.
Additional affiliations
Education
March 1976 - December 1979
Publications
Publications (227)
As áreas de reserva legal (ARLs) são parte fundamental da estratégia
brasileira de conservação, juntamente com as áreas de preservação permanente.
As ARLs são destinadas à manutenção da biodiversidade e podem ser manejadas
de forma sustentável. Quando essas áreas abrigam ecossistemas dependentes
de fogo e pastejo, como os campos nativos e as savana...
Abstract-Legal reserve areas (LRAs) are a fundamental part of the Brazilian conservation strategy, together with permanent preservation areas. The LRAs are intended to maintain biodiversity and can be managed sustainably. When these areas are home to ecosystems that depend on fire and grazing, such as native grasslands and savannas, management prac...
Epiphytes are considered indicators of forest ecological integrity, but the factors that explain their abundance are still not well understood. We here evaluated tree colonization by epiphytes in old-growth monospecific reforestation stands of Astronium urundeuva (M.Allemão) Engl. (Anacardiaceae) and Eucalyptus saligna Sm. (Myrtaceae), in compariso...
Water‐related ecosystem services are the most expected benefits from ecological restoration worldwide, because they directly improve the quality of life of human populations around and downstream the restored areas. However, the poor comprehension of how the vegetation drives the hydrological processes has resulted in some major ecological disaster...
Key message
Stem wounds heal most quickly in fast-growing trees. Despite slower growth among savanna species, their wound closure matches forest species, owing to a positive influence of investment in bark production.
Abstract
Stem wounding by fire poses a survival risk to trees in frequently burned environments. Ability to close wounds quickly is...
Tropical forest fragmentation from agricultural expansion alters the microclimatic conditions of the remaining forests, with effects on vegetation structure and function. However, little is known about how the functional trait variability within and among tree species in fragmented landscapes influence and facilitate species’ persistence in these n...
Increasing the biodiversity of Leucaena leucocephala (hereafter leucaena) stands without losing the benefits provided by the forest structure is a challenge for adaptive management. Here, we report the survival and growth (height, stem, and canopy diameter) of five Atlantic Forest tree species planted underneath a pure stand of the exotic leucaena,...
Tropical grasslands have been systematically neglected worldwide in maps, conservation policies, and ecological studies. After eradicating invasive pine trees from a Cerrado reserve in southeastern Brazil, an unprecedented grassy ecosystem arose in recent satellite images. In the field, we confirmed the first record of wet grasslands with termite m...
Although savanna woody encroachment has become a global phenomenon, relatively little is known about its effects on multiple dimensions and levels of savanna biodiversity.
Using a combination of field surveys, a species‐level phylogeny, and functional metrics drawn from a morphological dataset, we evaluated how the progressive increase in tree cove...
Ecological restoration of tropical open ecosystems remains challenging for both science and practice. Over the last decade, innovative techniques have been developed, but whether they have been successful or not remains to be demonstrated. Assessing the outcomes of these initiatives is crucial to drive the following steps to improve tropical grassl...
Ants represent one of the most diverse and ecologically important group of insects in tropical ecosystems, including in highly threatened ones such as the Brazilian Cerrado. Yet, a detailed understanding of the species diversity and composition of local Cerrado ant assemblages is lacking in many cases. Here we present the results of a comprehensive...
Frost effects on savanna plant communities have been considered as analogous to those from fire, both changing community structure and filtering species composition. However, while frost impacts have been well-studied for the woody component of savannas, it is still poorly explored for the ground-layer community. Here, we investigated effects of fr...
Cartas da rede hidrográfica elaboradas por instituições governamentais têm sido utilizadas para delimitação de Áreas de Preservação Permanente (APPs) no Brasil, mas são frequentes os problemas decorrentes de discrepâncias entre essas cartas e a verdade terrestre. Para caracterizar e quantificar essas discrepâncias, quer sejam metodológicas ou decor...
Wetlands are ecosystems at the interface between terrestrial and aquatic environments, subject to flooding by shallow waters or with temporarily to permanently waterlogged soils and specialized biota. Despite their great importance at global and local scales, these ecosystems have not been effectively protected in Brazil. The Cerrado wetlands are p...
In Brazil, the country with the highest plant species richness in the world, biodiverse savannas and grasslands – i.e., grassy ecosystems, which occupy 27% of the country – have historically been neglected in conservation and scientific treatments. Reasons for this neglect include misconceptions about the characteristics and dynamics of these ecosy...
Although livestock have been historically associated with land conversion and biodiversity loss, well‐managed cattle grazing has been reported to contribute to conservation of open ecosystems. Knowing the balance between positive and negative effects of livestock (presence or exclusion) on different ecosystems is, therefore, crucial to support mana...
Forest encroachment into savannas is a widespread phenomenon, the rate of which may depend on soil conditions, species composition or changes in stand structure. As savanna specialist trees are replaced by generalist species, rates of stand development may increase. Because generalists can persist in forests, they are likely to grow more quickly an...
Although savanna woody encroachment has become a global phenomenon, few studies have simultaneously evaluated its effects on multiple dimensions and levels of savanna biodiversity. We evaluated how the progressive increase in tree cover in a fire-suppressed savanna landscape affects the taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic diversity of neotropic...
Seed dispersal and predation by animals often drive plant regeneration. In tropical savannas, such as the Cerrado of Brazil, fire is also a key process in ecosystem dynamics, consuming the lower vegetation strata and killing wildlife, but how fire affects seed‐animal interactions is virtually unknown. We investigated the effects of prescribed fires...
When an ecosystem undergoing restoration does not follow the desired trajectory, management interventions may be warranted. Where the initial steps towards restoration include tree planting at high densities, reduction of stand basal area (BA) by overstory thinning is a potential adaptive management tool to stimulate natural regeneration, although...
Fire is a fundamental ecological factor in savannas because it affects vegetation dynamics and ecosystem functioning. However, the effects of fire on below‐ground compartments, including biomass and root traits, and their regeneration remain poorly understood. In this study, we assess the variation of above‐ and below‐ground plant components along...
We introduce the concept of Biome Awareness Disparity (BAD)—defined as a failure to appreciate the significance of all biomes in conservation and restoration policy—and quantify disparities in (a) attention and interest, (b) action and (c) knowledge among biomes in tropical restoration science, practice and policy.
By analysing 50,000 tweets from a...
Although cerrado trees have evolved with fire for millions of years, it is not well-understood which tree attributes are more important to survive fire in the Brazilian savanna. To address this issue, we used pre- and post-fire data on 367 cerrado trees (113 native species) planted in an arboretum in south-east Brazil and then left unburnt until 20...
Grasslands are under severe threat from ongoing degradation, undermining their capacity to support biodiversity, ecosystem services and human well-being. Yet, grasslands are largely ignored in sustainable development agendas. In this Perspective, we examine the current state of global grasslands and explore the extent and dominant drivers of their...
Woody encroachment into grassy biomes is a global phenomenon, often resulting in a nearly complete turnover of species, with savanna specialists being replaced by forest‐adapted species. Understanding the mechanisms involved in this change is important for devising strategies for managing savannas.
We examined how isolated trees favour woody encroa...
Ecological restoration interventions, in most cases, aim to restore habitat structure and plant community composition, thus re-establishing ecosystem functioning as similar as possible to that of the pre-existing natural ecosystem. However, given the difficulty of cultivating many species, that goal seems unattainable, unless “if you build it, they...
The Cerrado is the most diverse tropical savanna in the world. As a fire-prone ecosystem, natural fire in the Cerrado shapes plant communities and drives evolutionary processes. Human activities and landscape management can alter natural fire regimes and reshape Cerrado dynamics, making biodiversity conservation a challenge, particularly in densely...
Differently from commonly used forest conservation strategies, the absence of disturbance in non-forest-ecosystems can result in loss of biodiversity. Grassy ecosystems characterize extensive areas in all biomes in Brazil, offering great contribution to biological diversity and providing ecosystem services on which society depends. Palaeoecological...
Under fire suppression, many tropical savannas transform into forests. Forest expansion entails changes in environmental variables and plant community structure. We hypothesized that forest expansion into savanna results in a shift in community‐weighted mean functional traits from stress tolerance to competitiveness, with generalist species having...
Planting tree monocultures in Brazilian savannas is a common practice for wood production. However, afforestation and fire suppression have caused significant ecological changes and biodiversity loss in the Cerrado region. Restoring these modified systems to their pre-plantation states remains a considerable challenge. In this study, we compared th...
Planting native trees in high diversity has been widely recommended to recover tropical forests to regain ecosystems that are taxonomically and functionally similar to the native forests. However, whether planting mixed stands would provide better results than planting pure stands remains to be demonstrated. Aiming to support seasonal tropical fore...
Open grassy vegetation and forests share riparian zones across the Neotropical savannas, characterizing alternative stable states. However, factors determining the occurrence and maintenance of each vegetation type are yet to be elucidated. To disentangle the role of environmental factors (soil properties and groundwater depth) constraining tree co...
Aim. In savannas, a grass dominated ground layer is key to ecosystem function via grass-fire feedbacks that maintain open ecosystems. With woody encroachment, tree density increases, thereby decreasing light in the ground layer and potentially altering ecosystem function. We investigated how light availability can filter individual grass species di...
Despite growing recognition of the conservation value of grassy biomes, our understanding of how to restore biodiverse tropical and subtropical grassy biomes (grasslands and savannas; TGB) remains limited. Several tools have recently been identified for TGB restoration including prescribed fires, appropriate management of livestock and wild herbivo...
Translation of the original article "Myth-busting tropical grassy biome restoration” published in Restoration Ecology
Tradução do artigo original “Myth-busting tropical grassy biome restoration” publicado na Restoration Ecology que pode ser acessado aqui (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/rec.13202?af=R). Em caso de citação, deve-se...
Disentangling species strategies that confer resilience to natural disturbances is key to conserving and restoring savanna ecosystems. Fire is a recurrent disturbance in savannas, and savanna vegetation is highly adapted to and often dependent on fire. However, although the woody component of tropical savannas is well studied, we still do not under...
Vegetation–fire feedbacks are important for determining the distribution of forest and savanna. To understand how vegetation structure controls these feedbacks, we quantified flammability across gradients of tree density from grassland to forest in the Brazilian Cerrado.
We experimentally burned 102 plots, for which we measured vegetation structure...
Afforestation and fire exclusion are pervasive threats to tropical savannas. In Brazil, laws limiting prescribed burning hinder the study of fire in the restoration of Cerrado plant communities. We took advantage of a 2017 wildfire to evaluate the potential for tree cutting and fire to promote the passive restoration of savanna herbaceous plant com...
Invasion by exotic grasses is a severe threat to neotropical grasslands conservation and a major challenge for their restoration. To restore fire prone cerrado grasslands in southeastern Brazil, which have been massively invaded by the African grass Urochloa decumbens , we tested prescribed fire, herbicides and hoeing, by themselves or in different...
The historical focus in research and policy on forest restoration and temperate ecosystems has created misunderstandings for the restoration of tropical and subtropical old-growth grassy biomes (TOGGB). Such misconceptions have detrimental consequences for
biodiversity, ecosystem services and human livelihoods in woodlands, savannas and grasslands...
Fire has been a natural force modulating the vegetation of the Brazilian Cerrado since long before the first humans arrived in this region about 12 thousand years BP. Cerrado plants are, therefore, adapted to fire and some of them depend on fire to maintain their reproduction and survival. However, after the use of fire as a tool to destroy vast ex...
O manual reúne resultados de pesquisas do Instituto Florestal em parceria com outras instituição visando diagnosticar e compreender os processos de invasão de Pinus spp. e buscar soluções para o problema por meio de experimentação de técnicas de controle da invasão e restauração dos ecossistemas por ela prejudicados.
The original version of the article unfortunately contained an error.
Question
We aimed to evaluate the performance of native tree species in the restoration of savanna vegetation by direct seeding, to assess whether weed control and intercropping with native grasses can contribute to the success of this method and to determine whether species performance can be explained by functional traits.
Location
Cerrado biome...
Though they comprise 1 % of plant species on the planet, plant parasites are poorly known. They have been considered a threat to cultivated plants and to the conservation of host species in natural areas. Due to the complex interactions they have with their hosts, understanding their biology is fundamental to the development of conservation strateg...
Full text available under request or at https://rdcu.be/bRKK2
Despite advances in understanding the ecology and consequences of pine invasions, information on the patterns of structure, dynamics, and growth needed to manage these invasive populations are still poorly known. Here we used tree ring analysis to elucidate growth dynamics, age distribu...
Although savannas are fire-adapted ecosystems, prescribing fire for biodiversity conservation remains controversial at least in some regions where savannas occur. Faced with uncertainty, many decision makers and even scientists are still reluctant to prescribe fire for conservation purposes in fire-prone ecosystems, invoking the precautionary princ...
Bastin et al .’s estimate (Reports, 5 July 2019, p. 76) that tree planting for climate change mitigation could sequester 205 gigatonnes of carbon is approximately five times too large. Their analysis inflated soil organic carbon gains, failed to safeguard against warming from trees at high latitudes and elevations, and considered afforestation of s...
Bastin et al.’s estimate (Reports, 5 July 2019, p. 76) that tree planting for climate change mitigation could sequester 205 gigatonnes of carbon is approximately five times too large. Their analysis inflated soil organic carbon gains, failed to safeguard against warming from trees at high latitudes and elevations, and considered afforestation of sa...
Climate change is a global phenomenon that affects biophysical systems and human well-being. The Paris Agreement of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change entered into force in 2016 with the objective of strengthening the global response to climate change by keeping global temperature rise this century well below 2 °C above pre-i...
Tree planting is the most widely used technique for tropical forest restoration because it accelerates the recovery of forest structure and ecosystem functioning. Despite the importance of tree size distribution to the ecological function and habitat quality of restored forests, it has received little attention. Here we ask if the structure of refe...
Despite growing recognition of the conservation values of grassy biomes, our understanding of how to maintain and restore biodiverse tropical grasslands (including savannas and open‐canopy grassy woodlands) remains limited. To incorporate grasslands into large‐scale restoration efforts, we synthesised existing ecological knowledge of tropical grass...
Question
Assessing the natural regeneration potential of degraded savannas is a crucial step in restoration planning, since that assessment will define the need for and costs of active intervention. Predicting natural regeneration, however, depends on the mechanistic understanding of ecosystem resilience. Here, we searched for the factors modulatin...
Competition for soil water is one of the major processes that drive the assembly of plant communities, particularly in
regions subjected to long dry seasons. The relationship between plant density and soil water competition has strong,
but poorly understood, practical implications for population dynamics, restoration and conservation. We planted
se...
We discuss aspects of one of the most important issue in ecological restoration: how to evaluate restoration success. This first requires clearly stated and justified restoration goals and targets; this may seem ‘obvious’ but in our experience, this step is often elided. Indicators or proxy variables are the typical vehicle for monitoring; these mu...
A balanced and healthy diet entails the consumption of fruits since they are an important source of phytochemicals rich in vitamins–antioxidants. Therefore, identifying new fruits which can be included in the human diet is necessary. Miconia albicans (Sw.) Triana is a tall shrub native to the Brazilian savanna (“Cerrado”) that has not been consumed...
We currently face both an extinction and a biome crisis embedded in a changing climate. Many biodiverse ecosystems are being lost at far higher rates than they are being protected or ecologically restored. At the same time, natural climate solutions offer opportunities to restore biodiversity while mitigating climate change. The Bonn Challenge is a...
Given that land‐use change is the main cause of global biodiversity decline, there is widespread interest in adopting land‐use practices that maintain high levels of biodiversity, and in restoring degraded land that previously had high biodiversity value. In this study, we use ant taxonomic and functional diversity to examine the effects of differe...
Background: Fire has been reported to trigger the production of flowers and fruits in many fire-prone ecosystems around the world. However, for tropical savannas, little is known about the effects of fire on flower production at community and species scale, especially for the ground-layer.
Aims: We assessed the role of fire as a trigger to short-te...
Invasive trees can cause catastrophic reductions in diversity in invaded grasslands and savannas. Such reductions often appear to be particularly severe in the new biogeographic ranges of these invaders. We present results of a field study that examined the effect of slash pine (Pinus elliottii), native to the southeastern US, on savanna groundcove...
Neotropical grasslands have undergone intensive degradation by land conversion or biological invasion, but their restoration is still challenging. Here, we integrated two approaches to i) assessing the resilience of pristine dry and wet cerrado grasslands after removal of plants and topsoil and ii) evaluating the effectiveness of different treatmen...
Este trabalho apresenta o período de coleta de frutos e sementes para 330
espécies nativas do Cerrado, entre arbóreas, arbustivas e herbáceas, que
são recomendadas para recomposição ambiental no bioma. Essas informações
estão apresentadas de duas maneiras no trabalho. A primeira em uma
tabela com todas as espécies organizadas em ordem alfabetica, e...
The ability of vegetation to ameliorate or exacerbate environmental extremes can generate feedbacks that mediate the distribution of biomes. It has been suggested that feedbacks between vegetation and frost damage may be important for maintaining savanna, particularly at the edge of the tropics.
We quantified frost damage and air temperature across...
Uma das dificuldades para a recomposição ambiental é conhecer as espécies
mais indicadas para cada bioma e respectivas fitofisionomias. Este trabalho
fornece uma relação de 351 espécies nativas indicadas para ações
de recomposição de ambientes florestais, savânicos e campestres no bioma
Cerrado. A seleção dessas espécies foi baseada em workshops co...