Inara Leal

Federal University of Pernambuco | UFPE · Department of Botany

The conversion of old-growth forests to agricultural fields, followed by abandonment, has resulted in worldwide expansion of secondary forests. Secondary succession can bring back many organisms, restoring ecosystem functions and services, but studies often focus on the recovery of plant rather than animal communities. Here, we investigate whether...

Fire is a major disturbance affecting ecosystems globally, but its impact on mutualisms has received minimal attention. Here, we use a long-term field experiment to investigate the impact of different fire regimes on globally important ant–honeydew and ant–extrafloral nectar (EFN) mutualistic interactions in an Australian tropical savanna. These in...

The ability of dry forests to deliver ecosystem services of both local and global relevance depends on the capacity of those forests to recover from constant disturbances in human-modified landscapes. Here we examine the effects posed by biomass, chronic human disturbances and aridity on the recovery of reproductive functional diversity by edible f...

Seed rain is critical for forest recovery, especially in abandoned lands that have been exposed to agriculture. However, such a critical role depends on seed viability, which has been largely overlooked in most seed rain studies. We assessed the viability of 5378 seeds of 24 woody species in the seed rain falling into 12 plots from a Brazilian trop...

Plant reproduction is influenced by resource availability, environment and interactions with pollinators, pathogens and herbivores. In the Neotropical region, the leaf‐cutting ants are voracious herbivores and soil engineers, potentially affecting plant performance. This study investigated the effects of herbivory and soil changes via nest construc...

Under continuous human disturbance, regeneration is the basis for biodiversity persistence and ecosystem service provision. In tropical dry forests, edaphic ecosystem engineering by biological soil crusts (biocrusts) could impact regeneration by influencing erosion control and soil water and nutrient fluxes, which impact landscape hydrology, geomor...

We revised the literature on ant records in the Pernambuco Endemism Center – the Biogeographical Sub-Region Pernambuco in the Atlantic Forest – to synthesize the information regarding the diversity and distribution of ants in this important endemism area of the biome. We gathered 3769 ant records, encompassing over 10 subfamilies, 71 genera, and 24...

Interest in forest regeneration has increased as secondary forests in regeneration process are cited as the forests of the future. However, remaining forests are subjected to chronic anthropogenic disturbances, which may reorganize tropical biodiversity. This paper investigates the recovery of fruit-feeding butterfly assemblages following slash-and...

Regenerating forests make up an increasingly large portion of tropical landscapes worldwide and regeneration dynamics may be influenced by leaf‐cutting ants (LCA), which proliferate in disturbed areas and collect seeds for fungus culturing. Here, we investigate how LCA influences seed fate in human‐modified areas of Caatinga dry forest. We evaluate...

Anthropogenic disturbances and climate change are expected to reorganize biodiversity on multiple ecological levels from populations to ecosystems, especially in arid and semiarid regions due to environmental filtering imposed by water stress. This paper examines the individual and combined effects of chronic anthropogenic disturbance and increased...

Tropical forest regeneration across old fields has been mainly described as a predictable sequence of functional plant assemblages in response to environmental filtering. However, the way plant reproductive diversity is organized along forest regeneration and how the reproductive profile of woody flora may impact regeneration have been poorly inves...

Forest's recovery potential in human-modified landscapes is increasingly threatened by agricultural activities that disrupt critical sources of forest regeneration, such as the seed rain. Slash-and-burn agriculture is a good example. By slashing and burning the vegetation, this farming method can promote seed source and seed dispersal limitation, b...

Resprouting is a widespread mechanism through which woody plants recover from biomass loss and/or abiotic stress, particularly in fire-prone ecosystems. Here, we assess the resprouting responses to coppicing exhibited by woody plant species in a human-modified landscape of Caatinga dry forest, in the northeast of Brazil. A total of 150 resprouts...

Livestock browsing and trampling can deplete plant regeneration and thus drive natural ecosystems towards degradation. This phenomenon may be particularly true in tropical dry forests, which support extensive livestock herds feeding on native vegetation, but has rarely been experimentally addressed. Here we examine how browsing and trampling by exo...

Introduction Evolutionary traits acquired in response to one type of disturbance will potentially confer resilience to other disturbances that have similar environmental impacts, even if the biota has no evolutionary history of such disturbances. In grassy ecosystems the environmental impacts of grazing have important similarities to those of fire...

Tropical forests worldwide have succumbed to rapid conversion into agricultural landscapes, but the local- and landscape-scale drivers of functional diversity and consequently ecosystem functioning remain poorly known, which limits management and conservation strategies. Here, we quantitatively assess how biofuel croplands affect taxonomic and func...

Aim Locally abundant species are typically widespread, while locally scarce species are geographically restricted—the so‐called abundance‐occupancy relationships (AORs). AORs help explain the drivers of species rarity and community assembly, but little is known about how variation around such relationship is driven by species traits and niche‐based...

Chronic anthropogenic disturbances and climate change are the main threats to biodiversity, acting as potential drivers of assembly reorganization in human-modified tropical landscapes. We aimed to understand how the reproductive traits of edible fruit plant assemblages respond to chronic disturbances and aridity in the Caatinga, a dry forest in no...

Plants bearing extrafloral nectaries (EFNs) and their attendant ants are part of a mutualistic, facultative and generalized interaction. The final balance of this interaction can vary greatly over time and space, making the outcome context-dependent. In this study, we investigated how nectar volume and concentration mediate ant attraction and ant p...

[PT-BR] Este livro originou-se de todo o esforço teórico e prático resultante do XII Curso de Campo Ecologia e Conservação da Caatinga (ECCA), realizado em 2019 pela Universidade Federal de Pernambuco. O Curso de Campo da Caatinga tem como objetivo a formação de recursos humanos de alta qualidade através do treinamento científico de alunos de pós-g...

Plant–herbivore networks comprise over 40% of the global biodiversity and are negatively impacted by habitat loss and fragmentation. However, the extent to which these networks are affected by chronic anthropogenic disturbances and aridity, the most common threats to biodiversity in dry forests, remain unknown. In this study, we examined plant and...

Forest ecosystems are increasingly threatened by unsustainable agricultural practices, especially by those that damage their regenerative potential. This can be the case of slash-and-burn agriculture – a farming method that can negatively impact the soil seed bank, potentially limiting the resilience of forest ecosystems. To test this hypothesis, a...

Seedling recruitment, community assembly, and forest regeneration, while receiving substantial attention in tropical rain forests, have received little attention in tropical dry forests. Here, we examine the structure, composition, and diversity of woody seedling assemblages across 19 forest stands in a human‐modified landscape of Caatinga dry fore...

Chronic anthropogenic disturbance (CAD) and climate change represent two of the major threats to biodiversity globally, but their combined effects are not well understood. Here we investigate the individual and interactive effects of increasing CAD and decreasing rainfall on the composition and taxonomic (TD), functional (FD) and phylogenetic diver...

Ants, an ecologically successful and numerically dominant group of animals, play key ecological roles as soil engineers, predators, nutrient recyclers, and regulators of plant growth and reproduction in most terrestrial ecosystems. Further, ants are widely used as bioindicators of the ecological impact of land use. We gathered information of ant sp...

Extrafloral nectaries (EFNs) are anti‐herbivory defense‐related glands. We measured morphological and anatomical EFN traits in Pityrocarpa moniliformis trees along a rainfall gradient in Caatinga dry forest. We observed a reduction in structural EFN traits as rainfall decreased. We conclude that this reduction is a cost‐saving strategy, probably me...

Understanding species adaptations to human‐modified ecosystems is central to evolutionary and conservation biology. It is essential to evaluate trait variations in populations that occur along environmental gradients to understand the adaptive potential of species to human‐driven environmental change. We analyzed morphological trait variations in t...

Understanding patterns of tropical forest resilience is a central challenge in conservation ecology particularly in seasonally-dry tropical forests, where anthropogenic disturbance and climate change are pervasive threats. Here, we investigate the recovery rate and community organization of dung beetles along a Caatinga dry forest regeneration clin...

Main conclusion: The chloroplast genomes of Caesalpinia group species are structurally conserved, but sequence level variation is useful for both phylogenomic and population genetic analyses. Variation in chloroplast genomes (plastomes) has been an important source of information in plant biology. The Caesalpinia group has been used as a model in...

Seasonally dry tropical forests are characterized by several months of drought. Cenostigma microphyllum is a native woody species widely found in a seasonally dry tropical forest. These forests are in need of restoration and C. microphyllum is a species that can be used to this end. We studied, 1) acute water deficiency using plant in pot, and 2) c...

Background Seasonally dry tropical forests (SDTF) are among the most vulnerable ecosystems to chronic anthropogenic disturbances (CAD) such as agriculture, livestock and exploitation of wood and non-timber forest products which can negatively affect the local biota. We evaluated the influence of CAD and rainfall on the diversity of flesh flies (Dip...

Under habitat loss and fragmentation, the intensity of local ecological processes involving species interactions changes pervasively, accelerating local species extinctions, and disrupting essential ecosystem functions. We addressed this issue by examining the direct population drivers of apex predators (five felid species), armadillo mesopredators...

Community assembly arguably drives the provision of ecosystem services because they critically depend on which and how species coexist. We examine conspicuous cases of 'winner and loser' replacements (WLRs) in tropical forests to provide a framework integrating drivers, impacts on ecological organization, and reconfiguration of ecosystem service pr...

Biodiversity maintenance in human-modified landscapes largely depends on spatial variations in species composition (β-diversity), but the impact of human disturbance on β-diversity remains poorly understood. We examined how taxonomic and phylogenetic β-diversity of woody plant communities in the Brazilian Caatinga dry forest respond to two emerging...

Assim como os frutos de algumas plantas, o Curso de Campo Ecologia e Conservação da Caatinga - que gerou o livro Ecologia e Conservação da Caatinga - também veio de uma semente, uma concepção inicial. A tradição de realizar cursos de imersão em campo não é nova. Ela surge como uma necessidade de treinar/aperfeiçoar e repetir técnicas/etapas do méto...

Background: Biological invasion is one of the main threats to tropical biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. Prosopis juliflora (Sw) DC. (Fabales: Fabaceae: Caesalpinioideae) was introduced in the Caatinga dry forest of Northeast Brazil at early 1940s and successfully spread across the region. As other invasive species, it may benefit from the s...

Most terrestrial species occur in human‐modified landscapes that are experiencing climate change. In addition to direct impacts on species, both anthropogenic disturbance and climate change can have important effects through changes in species interactions, including the disruption of ecological services provided by them. Here we investigate how ch...

Perturbações antrópicas são consideradas a causa mais importante do declínio da biodiversidade em todo o mundo. Isso também é verdade para a Caatinga, o ecossistema menos estudado e menos protegido do Brasil. Um dos animais mais pluralísticos nesse bioma são as formigas, responsáveis pelos mais variados serviços ecossistêmicos, os quais vêm sendo c...

The proliferation of disturbance-adapted species in human-modified landscapes may change the structure of plant communities, but the response of biodiversity to human disturbances remains poorly understood. We examine the proliferation of the palm, Syagrus coronata , in disturbed forest stands and its impacts on the structure of vascular epiphyte a...

Agriculture and development transform forest ecosystems to human-modified landscapes. Decades of research in ecology have generated myriad concepts for the appropriate management of these landscapes. Yet, these concepts are often contradictory and apply at different spatial scales, making the design of biodiversity-friendly landscapes challenging....

Herbivores are considered important drivers of vegetation shifts in rangelands worldwide. In the Brazilian Caatinga, goats feeding mostly on natural vegetation account for 90% of the country's goat herds and play a vital role for rural livelihoods in this region. We used exclosure experiments aiming to assess the impact of goats on herbaceous commu...

Social insects, i.e. ants, bees, wasps and termites, are key components of ecological communities, and are important ecosystem services (ESs) providers. Here, we review the literature in order to (i) analyse the particular traits of social insects that make them good suppliers of ESs; (ii) compile and assess management strategies that improve the s...

Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) symbioses are thought to help plants to cope with harsh environments and to affect not only plant fitness, but also ecological organization from population to ecosystem level. Here, we investigated to what extent this association was present, and what the major environmental drivers were in a human-modified landsc...

The mechanisms affecting forest regeneration in human‐modified landscapes are attracting increasing attention as tropical forests have been recognized as key habitats for biodiversity conservation, provision of ecosystem services, and human well‐being. Here we investigate the effect of the leaf‐cutting ants (LCA) Atta opaciceps on regenerating plan...

Very large tropical forest trees (‘mega-trees’) represent an irreplaceable habitat associated with large benefits in terms of biodiversity and ecosystem services. Here we provide a comprehensive overview of the importance of tropical mega-trees relative to biodiversity persistence, ecosystem services, and sociocultural value. We describe all contem...

Decades of research suggest that species richness depends on spatial characteristics of habitat patches, especially their size and isolation. In contrast, the habitat amount hypothesis predicts that: 1) species richness in plots of fixed size (species density) is more strongly and positively related to the amount of habitat around the plot than to...

Visando a formação de mestres e doutores críticos e treinados na elaboração de projetos de pesquisa, os cursos de campo têm sido bastante fomentados por vários programas de pós-graduação e instituições de ensino em várias partes do mundo. No Brasil, essa tradição surgiu no final dos anos 70 com a realização de um curso de campo na Amazônia, a parti...

Biological soil crusts (biocrusts) have been recognized as key ecological players in arid and semiarid regions at both local and global scales. They are important biodiversity components, provide critical ecosystem services, and strongly influence soil-plant relationships, and successional trajectories via facilitative, competitive, and edaphic eng...

Although extrafloral nectar (EFN) is a key food resource for arboreal ants, its role in structuring ground-nesting ant communities has received little attention, despite these ants also being frequent EFN-attendants. We investigated the role of EFN as a driver of the spatial structure of ground-nesting ant communities occurring in dry forest in nor...

Anthropogenic disturbance and climate change are major threats to biodiversity persistence and functioning of many tropical ecosystems. Although increases in the intensity of anthropogenic disturbance and climate change are associated with reduced taxonomic, phylogenetic and functional diversities of several organisms, little is known about how suc...

Climate change is projected to exacerbate the effects of anthropogenic disturbance, with negative impacts on ecosystem stability and functioning. We evaluate the additive and combined effects of chronic anthropogenic disturbance (CAD) and rainfall variation on the temporal stability of mutualistic EFN‐bearing plant‐ant networks in a Caatinga dry fo...

This study examined how chronic anthropogenic disturbance impacts the spatiotemporal dynamics of ant foraging activity and the role played by behavioral traits. Ten plots (0.1 ha) along a gradient of chronic disturbance intensity were sampled in Catimbau National Park (Caatinga vegetation, Brazil). Vegetative structure, ground surface temperature,...

Tropical plant assemblages can be taxonomically and phylogenetically impoverished by chronic anthropogenic disturbance (CAD), such as firewood collection and extensive grazing. However, to what extent the functional dimension responds to CAD is still unclear. Such knowledge is urgently required for predicting, preventing or even reversing the impac...

Anthropogenic disturbance and climate change are the main drivers of biodiversity loss and ecological services around the globe. There is concern that climate change will exacerbate the impacts of disturbance and thereby promote biotic homogenization, but its consequences for ecological services are unknown. We investigated the individual and inter...

Flower and leaf herbivory might cause relevant and negative impacts on plant fitness. While flower removal or damage by florivores produces direct negative effects on plant fitness, folivores affect plant fitness by reducing resource allocation to reproduction. In this study, we examine the effects of both flower and leaf herbivory by leaf-cutting...

Leaf-cutting ants are dominant herbivores in Neotropical rain forests, and their colony densities increase in disturbed habitats such as forest edges. However, while it is well-established that leaf-cutting ants profit from changes to the food-plant community, the phylogenetic dimension of this ant-plant interaction remains poorly understood in fra...