Hernani Fernandes Magalhaes Oliveira

• Doctor in Biology
• University of Brasília

Conservation policies in Brazil differ between the "biomes" into which the country has divided its territory since 2004. The Amazon biome is predominantly tropical forest but also includes unique savanna ecosystems, while the Cerrado biome is composed of various types of savanna but also includes islands and corridors of forest. Confusion, both ina...

Fire has significantly shaped the dynamics of Brazilian Cerrado fauna and flora, but the interference of human activities and climate change has disrupted the natural fire regime, imperilling multiple animal and plant populations. Our study, performed at Reserva Ecológica do Roncador (RECOR‐IBGE) in Brasília‐Brazil, examined the influence of fire f...

Global biodiversity and ecosystem function are the result of complex networks of interactions and feedbacks between animals and their environments, which in turn are affected by the interactions and feedbacks between animals and the organisms they host. Understanding these complex networks, including the main drivers of and responses to ecological...

Recent studies in forest canopies have revealed new findings on species interactions and diversity; hitherto poorly understood. This glaring gap results from the challenges of recording arboreal and scansorial species and their interactions in the vertical strata. We present a new methodology that allows installing camera-traps at multiple forest s...

Anthropogenic changes in natural habitats are one of the main causes of disruptions in plant-pollinator interaction due to plant community alterations, which can affect pollinator persistence. However, pollinators can expand their interactions by exploring alternative resources to compensate for already-established partners’ loss. Ecological networ...

Na coalizão Respira Amazônia, unimos forças entre entidades públicas e privadas com um único propósito: fortalecer o monitoramento da qualidade do ar na região amazônica. Nosso trabalho foca no apoio a iniciativas que monitoram, coletam e analisam dados sobre a poluição atmosférica na Amazônia. Os parceiros e integrantes da Coalizão utilizam dive...

The short-eared dog (Atelocynus microtis) is the only endemic Amazonian canid species, which is also elusive and rarely recorded across its distribution, making it one of the least known canid species in the world. Even though it is considered to be a carnivore species, it has been reported to consume other food items, such as fruits. However, no c...

Wedell & Kemp (2024) examined the importance of female sexual preferences for male UV reflectance on offspring viability and the evolution of male traits in the butterfly Eurema hecabe. Female preferences were found to have multiple consequences, including increased trait value, higher offspring viability, and reduced mutational load. These finding...

DNA barcoding and environmental DNA (eDNA) represent an important advance for biomonitoring the world's biodiversity and its threats. However, these methods are highly dependent on the presence of species sequences on molecular databases. Brazil is one of the largest and most biologically diverse countries in the world. However, many knowledge gaps...

A expansão das fronteiras agropecuárias é o principal vetor da perda de habitat naturais no mundo e a maior causadora de impactos sobre a biodiversidade até o ano de 2100, levando ao grande declínio de espécies nos trópicos. Devido à grande magnitude e velocidade da perda de habitat no arco do desmatamento (especialmente no Mato Grosso), é indispen...

Habitat heterogeneity affects species distribution, and a better understanding of this relationship can inform biodiversity conservation. To understand how habitat heterogeneity affects multiple dimensions of biodiversity, we sampled fruit-feeding butterflies within savannah woodlands and gallery forests from July 2012 to June 2013 in the Cerrado....

Aim To investigate the influence of ecological factors, geologic and climatic history on current diversity patterns of bat communities. We predicted that (i) our three different biodiversity dimensions (species richness, functional and phylogenetic diversity) will have a positive relationship with habitat heterogeneity; (ii) variation in phylogene...

This study focused on the cave fauna of Costa Rica, which has remained relatively understudied despite the presence of more than 435 recorded natural caves and artificial subterranean sites. We collected and reviewed all available literature data on cave fauna in Costa Rica and created the first comprehensive review of the existing information. In...

The brown-eared woolly opossum (Caluromys lanatus) is an elusive frugivorous Neotropical canopy specialist marsupial considered primarily arboreal, but here we report the first records of individuals from this species captured on the ground in the Cerrado. We hypothesize two main reasons to explain this behavior: first related to canopy openness, w...

Rivers can be difficult barriers for animals to cross, especially animals that cannot swim or fly. The Amazon region has many of the largest rivers in the world, which limits the movements of many animals that cannot cross them. Thus, some animal species occur on one side of a river but not on the other side. Isolation of animal species caused by r...

As air temperatures soar to record highs in parts of the Amazonia, water levels are falling fast (see go.nature. com/3pvdgve). Authorities have announced emergency measures against impending drought, aware that millions have been harmed by extreme droughts in the past. This year, the emergence of El Niño and the unusually high sea surface temperatu...

Fire has significantly shaped the dynamics of Brazilian Cerrado fauna and ora, but the interference of human activities and climate change has disrupted the natural re regime, imperiling multiple animal and plant populations. Our study, performed at Reserva Ecológica do Roncador (RECOR) in Brasília-Brazil, examined the influence of fire frequency a...

Knowledge regarding the influence of individual traits on interaction patterns in nature can help understand the topological role of individuals within a network of intrapopulation interactions. We tested hypotheses on the relationships between individuals’ positions within networks (specialization and centrality) of four populations of the mouse o...

Introduction Body-size covaries with many species’ traits, with implications for population and ecosystem-level patterns. Body size and seasonality of a species may covary if, for certain body sizes and optimal resource availability, meet the larger energy requirements of large-bodied species, are restricted to a narrow temporal window. Aim/method...

O artigo traz um alertar sobre os perigos ocultos por trás da recente política de desmatamento da Europa que tem como objetivo limitar a importação de produtos ligados ao desmatamento: este é o acordo que a União Europeia (UE) pretende estabelecer como lei em um futuro próximo. A nova regulamentação irá afetar diversos países, incluindo o Brasil, q...

Agri-environmental schemes (AES) are used to enhance pollinator diversity on agricultural farms within the UK. Though the impacts of these schemes on archetypal pollinator species such as the bumblebee ( Bombus ) and honeybee ( Apis ) are well-studied, the effects on non-target bee species like solitary bees, in the same environment, are generally...

The Dekeyser's nectar bat (Lonchophylla dekeyseri) is a cave roosting bat endemic to the Brazilian Cerrado that is considered endangered according to the IUCN Red List. Even though it is likely highly threatened, there is no current assessment of its conservation status or the conservation of the caves within its distribution. Additionally, a chang...

Research and media attention is disproportionately focused on taxa and ecosystems perceived as charismatic, while other equally diverse systems such as caves and subterranean ecosystems are often neglected in biodiversity assessments and prioritisations. Highlighting the urgent need for protection, an especially large fraction of cave endemic speci...

The land rights and culture of Brazilian Indigenous peoples will once again come under threat when the Supreme Federal Court votes next month on its Timeframe Thesis (Tese do Marco Temporal; see go.nature. com/3lzfb). This claims that Indigenous peoples are entitled to only the territories that they occupied when the constitution was set up in 1988...

The Amazon comprises many of the largest rivers in the planet and also houses some of the richest bat communities in the world. Rivers are important geographic barriers for the dispersal and distribution of different taxa worldwide and, particularly in the Amazon region, they form the conceptual and empirical bases for the recognition of the so-cal...

Introduction: Diet and temporal specialists, especially those in tropical seasonal environments, require synchronous phenology with hosts. Species with life-history-traits that covary with temporal specialization may be particularly vulnerable to climate-driven changes in phenology. In the Cerrado, larger fruit-feeding butterflies species tend to b...

Understanding biodiversity patterns as well as drivers of population declines, and range losses provides crucial baselines for monitoring and conservation. However, the information needed to evaluate such trends remains unstandardised and sparsely available for many taxonomic groups and habitats, including the cave-dwelling bats and cave ecosystems...

Brazil’s government has changed the designation of caves that warrant top priority for conservation (see go.nature.com/3gy5). Constituting some 13–30% of the country’s 22,000 protected caves, these will now be open to commercial exploitation, which could seriously affect their vulnerable fauna. The expansion of the mining sector, driven partially...

Interaction network structure reflects the ecological mechanisms acting within biological communities, which are affected by environmental conditions. In tropical forests, higher precipitation usually increases fruit production, which may lead frugivores to increase specialization, resulting in more modular and less nested animal‐plant networks. In...

The relationship between environmental heterogeneity and species diversity has been one of the most studied patterns in ecology. However, some taxa and regions worldwide still lack studies to verify this relationship. Phyllostomidae is the most ecologically diverse family of mammals worldwide, encompassing a great proportion of the species of mamma...

Introduction: In animals, body size is correlated with many aspects of natural history, such as life span, abundance, dispersal capacity and diet breadth. However, contrasting trends have been reported for the relationship between body size and these ecological traits. Methods: Fruit-feeding butterflies were used to investigate whether body size is...

Introduction: Body size is correlated with many aspects of an animal species' natural history , such as life span, abundance, dispersal capacity and diet breadth. However, contrasting trends have been reported for the relationship between body size and these ecological traits. Methods: Butterfly species from fruit-feeding guilds were used to invest...

Research and media attention is disproportionately focused on taxa and ecosystems perceived as charismatic, while other systems with high levels of endemism, are often under-protected and overlooked such as caves and subterranean ecosystems. Yet these more challenging systems are also threatened, with karsts for example losing around 6% of their ar...

Understanding biodiversity patterns as well as drivers of population declines, and range losses provides crucial baselines for monitoring and conservation. However, the information needed to evaluate such trends remains unstandardised and sparsely available for many taxonomic groups and habitats, including the cave-dwelling bats and cave ecosystems...

Although most variation regarding bat colouration has been recorded for fur, there have also been a few bat species for which intraspecific variation in wing translucency has been reported. However, all records are from the Paleotropics, with no cases reported for any bat species in the Neotropics. Here we describe the first case of intraspecific v...

Research and media attention is disproportionately focused on taxa and ecosystems perceived as charismatic, while other systems with high levels of endemism, are often under-protected and overlooked such as caves and subterranean ecosystems. Yet these more challenging systems are also threatened, with karsts for example losing around 6% of their ar...

The growing dependence of villagers on local forests (food, wood, etc.) makes the comparative assessment of the perceptions they have of the forest and its wildlife increasingly important for setting conservation priorities. While hunting and habitat loss are important threats to primates' existence worldwide, more attention has been focused on diu...

Constructing ecological networks has become an indispensable approach in understanding how different taxa interact. However, the methods used to generate data in network research vary widely among studies, potentially limiting our ability to compare results meaningfully. In particular, methods of classifying nodes vary in their precision, likely al...

Dominated mostly by small scattered trees and a patchy canopy , savannas offer few places for bats to shelter. However, within Brazil's savanna ecoregion known as the Cerrado, riparian forests and seasonal dry forests provide an exception. Most bat species that naturally have white fur are associated with the habit of roosting under tree leaves; in...

Mountain ecosystems cover a large proportion of Earth and represent important environments for a range of different taxa, including nocturnal primates. This group of primates is generally understudied because of their small size and their cryptic and nocturnal nature. Thus, much of their ecology and distribution still remains unknown, especially in...

Morphological variation between individuals can increase niche segregation and decrease intraspecific competition when heterogeneous individuals explore their environment in different ways. Among bat species, wing shape correlates with flight maneuverability and habitat use, with species that possess broader wings typically foraging in more clutter...

Cerrado is a biodiversity hotspot composed of a vegetation mosaic landscape ranging from grasslands to forests. It holds a high endemicity of plants and vertebrate species sufering from high habitat destruction rates. We aimed at characterizing the mutualistic interactions between bats and the plant species present in their diet in the diferent hab...

• Spatial and temporal variation in networks has been reported in different studies. However, the many effects of habitat structure and food resource availability variation on network structures have remained poorly investigated, especially in individual‐based networks. This approach can shed light on individual specialization of resource use and h...

Full list of authors J. Murray, N. K Esther, K. Flood, B. Chapple, H. Rudd, K. Retourne, L. Barrie, O. A. Uthman, J. Robertson, K. Stephenson, A. Chatkley, L. Hofstra, A. Tananaeva, A. Hector, T. Aktas, P. Paija, V. W. Wanjohi, T. Beck, C. Kimani, J. Testa, E. O. Sindiyo, T. A. Barnfield, S. Dicken, G. Cerullo, C. Thompson, J. Becker, M. Wise, S....

Variation in the diet of generalist insectivores can be affected by site-specific traits including weather, habitat, and season, as well as demographic traits such as reproductive status and age. We used molecular methods to compare diets of three distinct New Zealand populations of lesser short-tailed bats, Mystacina tuberculata. Summer diets were...

Constructing networks has become an indispensable approach in understanding how different taxa interact. However, methodologies vary widely among studies, potentially limiting our ability to meaningfully compare results. In particular, how network architecture is influenced by the extent to which nodes are resolved to either taxa or taxonomic units...

Caves are important bat roosts worldwide that are used as shelters, maternity roosts, and to help in thermoregulation. Bat abundances, species richness, and association patterns inside caves can be affected by large-scale environmental variation. However, few studies have analyzed the effect of latitudinal and altitudinal variations on these patter...

Bats are the second most diverse mammal order and they provide vital ecosystem functions (e.g., pollination, seed dispersal, and nutrient flux in caves) and services (e.g., crop pest suppression). Bats are also important vectors of infectious diseases, harboring more than 100 different virus types. In the present study, we compiled information on b...

The Brazilian savanna (Cerrado) is a biodiversity hotspot with high deforestation rates that lead to extensive habitat changes, especially around protected areas (PAs). In our study, we analyzed how bats are affected by habitat changes comparing assemblages inside and outside Cerrado PAs. We compared diversity patterns of bats in relation to specie...

Guia de sementes dispersas por morcegos da America Latina

Fire is a common and natural event in Cerrado that can influence the composition of trees and mammals and change the entire conditions of the environment. This study was developed in a gallery forest of Distrito Federal - Brazil. Bat samplings were conducted for a total of six nights after a fire that happened on the gallery forest. Three samplings...

[This corrects the article on p. e49734 in vol. 7.].

Competition is one of the most cited mechanisms to explain secondary sexual dimorphism in animals. Nonetheless, it has been proposed that sexual dimorphism in bat wings is also a result of adaptive pressures to compensate additional weight caused by fetus or pup carrying during the reproductive period of females. The main objective of this study is...

Albinism has been observed in many vertebrate taxa, but is a rare phenomenon in bats. A recent review reports records of complete albinism in 38 species among the 1,045 bat species occurring in the world. We sampled the area of the Ecological Station of Águas Emendadas, in Planaltina, northeast of Brasília, Federal District of Brazil, in October of...

Dissertação (mestrado)—Universidade de Brasília, Instituto de Ciências Biológicas, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Biologia Animal, 2008. Embora os morcegos representem a maioria dos mamíferos do Cerrado e sejam bons indicadores de áreas preservadas e degradadas, poucos estudos com esse enfoque são realizados no Brasil. O objetivo deste estudo foi ver...