Jean Paul Metzger

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at University of São Paulo

The Brazilian Atlantic Forest is a global biodiversity hotspot that harbours a high number of endemic species and provides important ecosystem services. However, a long history of deforestation means that only 24% of its original forest cover remains and studies are needed to examine the spatial and temporal patterns of forest loss to better unders...

Land use change threatens global biodiversity and compromises ecosystem functions, including pollination and food production. Reduced taxonomic α‐diversity is often reported under land use change, yet the impacts could be different at larger spatial scales (i.e., γ‐diversity), either due to reduced β‐diversity amplifying diversity loss or increased...

Esta Nota Técnico-Científica 5 integra a Série Biota Síntese e aborda o potencial da polinização como abordagem promissora para a biodiversidade e relevância para as atividades agrícolas. Entre os Serviços Ecossistêmicos (SE) providos pela biodiversidade, a polinização é um dos mais estudados. Apesar de ser avaliada como altamente relevante para as...

Interdisciplinary synthesis research has been promoting significant advances in expanding academic knowledge. However, its application to address social-ecological problems poses challenges, typical of transdisciplinary research and co-production initiatives. Based on the experience of seven working groups from a Brazilian syn- thesis nucleus dedic...

Habitat loss can lead to biotic homogenization (decrease in β diversity) or differentiation (increase in β diversity) of biological communities. However, it is unclear which of these ecological processes predominates in human-modified landscapes. We used data on vertebrates, invertebrates, and plants to quantify β diversity based on species occurre...

Habitat loss can lead to biotic homogenization (decrease in β diversity) or differentiation (increase in β diversity) of biological communities. However, it is unclear which of these ecological processes predominates in human‐modified landscapes. We used data on vertebrates, invertebrates, and plants to quantify β diversity based on species occurre...

Large-scale forest restoration is vital for delivering a broad array of ecosystem services benefits to society. However, it is often perceived as an economically noncompetitive land use choice. Integrating economic opportunities into restoration aligns socioeconomic and environmental goals, reducing conflicts between forest production and conservat...

Urban streetscapes serve as essential public domains shaping community well-being and identity. Our study searches into the nuanced factors influencing the provision of urban aesthetic service. Employing online surveys, deep learning analyses, and spatial modeling, we explore the intricate interplay between ground level and landscape level features...

The achievement of international forest restoration goals requires economically viable land-use options. The Brazilian Atlantic Forest is a priority area for ecosystem restoration, as it is widely deforested to make place for intensive agriculture and one of the most threatened biodiversity hotspots in the world. We systematically reviewed existing...

The Atlantic Forest is a global biodiversity hotspot and a significant provider of ecosystem services to 65% of the Brazilian population. Due to being highly threatened, it is protected by federal law 11,428/2006, which establishes forest use restrictions based on native vegetation successional stages in the Atlantic Forest, with more advanced stag...

Controlling tropical deforestation requires a detailed understanding of its drivers. Here we provide for the first time a comprehensive quantitative and qualitative time-series analysis of mature forest loss within the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, a well-known global biodiversity hotspot. From 2010 to 2020 we detected 14,401 deforestation polygons, r...

Biodiversity offsets and compensation have been largely applied worldwide using ecological equivalence assessment methods to quantify the environmental quality in impact and compensation sites. However, these methods present limitations that may hinder reaching equivalence in trades. In Brazil, the New Forest Act demands compensation of Legal Reser...

Ecological restoration is vital for reversing biodiversity loss and climate change but faces cost-related implementation challenges, hampering global restoration efforts. Identifying when restoration within agricultural landscapes provides financial benefits—either by increasing crop yields or providing carbon credits—is imperative. Here, we develo...

Biodiversity offsets are commonly used to compensate for environmental impacts, but their effectiveness is often questioned. Estimations of expected losses and gains often rely on what we called condition metrics, which measure a site’s quality or condition using certain ecological attributes. Condition metrics are central to most offset policies,...

Despite advances in understanding the effects of landscape structure on ecosystem services (ES), many challenges related to these complex spatial interactions remain. In particular, the integration of landscape effects on different components of the service provision chain (supply, demand, and flow) remains poorly understood and conceptualized. Her...

Decades of research indicate that while native habitat loss often drives biodiversity loss and biotic homogeni-zation, there are frequent exceptions. Relying on a multi-level landscape design, multiple biodiversity metrics and species habitat associations we explored one such exception. We investigated dung beetle responses to Atlantic Forest loss...

Inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration in environmental studies faces the challenge of communicating across disciplines to reach a common understanding of scientific problems and solutions in a changing world. One way to address current pressing environmental challenges is to employ a boundary work approach that uses activities across borders o...

Restoration of native tropical forests is crucial for protecting biodiversity and ecosystem functions, such as carbon stock capacity. However, little is known about the contribution of early stages of forest regeneration to crop productivity through the enhancement of ecosystem services, such as crop pollination and pest control. Using data from 61...

Anthropogenic habitat disturbance is fundamentally altering patterns of disease transmission and immunity across the vertebrate tree of life. Most studies linking anthropogenic habitat change and disease focus on habitat loss and fragmentation, but these processes often lead to a third process that is equally important: habitat split. Defined as sp...

Agricultural sustainability standards are an important way of reducing commodity expansion's pressures on biodiversity. Despite the increase of global area under certification and mounting evidence of positive socioeconomic outcomes, certification-derived conservation benefits are less clear. We applied a robust counterfactual approach with a diffe...

CoP-15 Biodiversidade, em três artigos de difusão em O Eco: . . 1- Da CoP-27 à CoP-15: A Biodiversidade em Foco (em https://oeco.org.br/analises/da-cop-27-a-cop-15-a-biodiversidade-em-foco/ ); . . 2- Avanços na Agenda de Biodiversidade nas Últimas Décadas; Papel Importante do Brasil (em https://oeco.org.br/analises/avancos-na-agenda-de-biodiversi...

Species cross‐boundary response is a key mechanism affecting species spillover into agricultural fields. However, temporal changes in edge permeability, which may depend on the seasonal availability of resources in both matrix and native habitats, remain poorly understood. Here we tested how edge crossing behavior and the associated spillover of bi...

Habitat loss represents a major threat to biodiversity, however, the modulation of its effects by the nonhabitat matrix surrounding habitat patches is still undervalued. The landscape matrix might change community assembly in different ways. For example, low‐quality matrices can accentuate environmental filtering by reducing resource availability a...

Biological pest control is one of the key services from which agricultural production benefits. Despite being a well-studied ecosystem service, the potential of different matrices in shaping natural enemy contributions to pest predation is not yet clear. We used an experimental approach with predation experiments to investigate whether matrices wit...

Growing demand for minerals is increasing pressure to open protected areas (PAs) for mining. Here we develop spatially explicit models to compare impacts among five policy scenarios to downgrade combinations of PA to allow mining in the Brazilian Amazon. We found downgrading (opening) the region’s entire PAs network to develop an additional 242 min...

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 benefits of green infrastructure on human well‐being in urban areas are already well‐established, with strong evidence of the positive effects of the amount and proximity to green areas. However, the understanding of how the spatial distribution and type of green areas affect health is still an open question. Here, through a land sharing and sp...

Natural forest regeneration is a key component of global ecosystem restoration scenarios. Regenerated forests, however, may not persist and a better understanding of the drivers of forest persistence is critical to ensure the success of restoration efforts. We used 35 years of detailed land cover maps to quantify forest regeneration and study the d...

Restoration actions can halt biodiversity loss and rescue its services. However, in order to be effective, priority areas for restoration should be chosen based on objective large‐scale restoration planning. Here, a multicriteria graph theory framework was used to propose restoration priority areas for the Brazilian Caatinga, the largest seasonally...

Brazil's ecological intergovernmental fiscal transfer (ICMS-E) is a conservation incentive for protected areas (PAs). It redistributes tax revenues to reward municipalities for hosting PAs. To quantify its impact on the creation of state and municipal PAs, we used panel regressions on a longitudinal municipality dataset that combined information on...

Animal pollinators are globally threatened by anthropogenic land use change and agricultural intensification. The yield of many food crops is therefore negatively impacted because they benefit from biotic pollination. This is especially the case in the tropics. For instance, fruit set of Coffea arabica has been shown to increase by 10–30% in planta...

Natural ecosystems are under severe threat worldwide and environmental policies are essential to minimize present and future impacts on biodiversity, ecosystem services and climate change. The New Forest Act in Brazil is the main policy to protect native vegetation in private lands, which comprise 54% of the remaining Brazilian native vegetation. H...

Esta obra integra a série Biota Síntese e constitui-se como a Nota Técnico-Científica 1. O foco do Biota Síntese é a coprodução, de forma colaborativa e transdisciplinar, de soluções baseadas na natureza. Essas soluções englobam um amplo espectro de ações, da conservação ao uso sustentável e à restauração, que se utilizam de processos ou serviços e...

Native vegetation in private lands plays an important role in providing ecosystem services and safeguarding biodiversity worldwide. Legal protection rules of this vegetation are thus crucial. In Brazil, since 1934, there has been a requirement for landowners to preserve a percentage of their land covered with native vegetation, the Legal Reserve. H...

Cross-habitat movements are crucial for persistence of beneficial insects in agricultural landscapes; however, much remains unknown on how landscape structure affects the spillover of beneficial insects between crop and non-crop habitats. To estimate the effects of landscape structure on the spillover of beneficial insects we sampled predatory wasp...

Enhancing biodiversity‐based ecosystem services can generate win–win opportunities for conservation and agricultural production. Pollination and pest control are two essential agricultural services provided by mobile organisms, many depending on native vegetation networks beyond the farm scale. Many studies have evaluated the effects of landscape c...

The provision of ecosystem services is inherently spatial. Landscape structure affects service provision through multiple landscape-level processes, such as fragmentation, edge and connectivity effects. These processes can affect areas of ecosystem service supply and demand, and the flows linking those areas. Despite the emergence of sophisticated...

Landscape connectivity is important for a wide range of ecological processes, including to disease spread, once it describes the degree to which landscapes facilitate or impede vector and hosts dispersion. Understanding connectivity is extremely important to identify where pathogens can move, and at what speed, allowing the organization of vaccinat...

Habitat loss and fragmentation represent a major threat to biodiversity, however, the modulation of its effects by the non-habitat matrix surrounding habitat patches is still undervalued. The landscape matrix might change community assembly in different ways. For example, low-quality matrices can accentuate environmental filtering by reducing resou...

Cross-habitat spillover (i.e. the movement of individuals between different habitat types) occurs very often in agricultural landscapes, following temporary crop resource pulses that work as complementary resources for biodiversity. We tested how avian spillover at edges of forest fragments is affected by the adjacent agricultural matrix contrast (...

Although offsetting schemes may avoid biodiversity loss, the implementation of these schemes can be challenging, given the difficulty of balancing biodiversity benefits with the resulting increase in compensation costs. Here we have developed a novel offsetting methodological approach to balance environmental gains and land availability to support...

Context Amazonian white-sand ecosystems ( campinas ) are open vegetation patches which form a natural island-like system in a matrix of tropical rainforest. Due to a clear distinction from the surrounding matrix, the spatial characteristics of campina patches may affect the genetic diversity and composition of their specialized organisms, such as t...

Setting aside private land is an essential component of the biodiversity crisis response. In Brazil, landowners are required to have Legal Reserves (LR) (20%–80% of their property set aside for native vegetation) which, if degraded, need to be restored. Alternatively, landowners can compensate for an LR deficit by purchasing surplus credits. Each l...

Understanding the links between biological communities and ecosystem service provision through the mechanisms driven by landscape structure is crucial to promote management strategies that safeguard both biodiversity and provision of these services. Here, we assess the impact of landscape structure and matrix contrast on carrion removal by scavenge...

Ensuring a sufficient and adequate supply of water for humans and ecosystems is a pressing environmental challenge. The expansion of agricultural and urban lands has jeopardized watershed ecosystem services and a changing climate poses additional risks for regional water supply. We used stream water quality data collected between 2000 and 2014, cou...

Policymakers’ incentives during election campaigns can lead to decisions that significantly affect deforestation. Yet this is rarely studied. For Brazil's Atlantic Forest, a highly biodiverse tropical forest, we link federal‐and‐state as well as municipal elections to annual deforestation between 1991 and 2014. Across 2253 municipalities, those wit...

Environmental policies that require native vegetation conservation can be challenging to implement, especially in productive agricultural landscapes. In Brazil, the Brazilian Native Vegetation Protection Law mandates ‘Legal Reserves’, protected native vegetation that landowners must retain on their properties. If landowners do not have the required...

Background Several studies have investigated the association between green infrastructure and human health in cities and showed a positive relationship, as the amount or proximity to green spaces related with a reduction in the risk of cardiovascular diseases, in small geographical scales such as a few minutes walking to access those green areas. W...

Conservation biology is designed to identify pressing environmental problems and to solve them. This review evaluates the relative effort of conservation biology in problem-based and solution-based research, and tests whether or not this has changed in the past decades for five major drivers of biodiversity loss, i.e. habitat loss and fragmentation...

Context Tropical forests are great reservoirs of carbon but they still suffer high rates of deforestation despite their importance. Yet, large uncertainty remains about the effects of landscape-level forest loss on biomass of forest remnants, and how these effects vary with disturbance intensity at larger regional scales. Objectives We evaluated w...

ContextDetermining the appropriate scale at which to study species’ interactions with their environment is a great challenge.Objective We investigated the spatial extent at which landscape structure affects the occurrence of four species of terrestrial mammalian herbivores in the Brazilian savannas and examined whether those scales could be explain...

Understanding the dynamics of native forest loss and gain is critical for biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services, especially in regions experiencing intense forest transformations. We quantified native forest cover dynamics on an annual basis from 1990 to 2017 in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest. Despite the relative stability of native forest co...

Privately protected areas promote the conservation of biodiversity and have also been shown to conserve valuable ecosystem services. Legally binding instruments like conservation covenants are important mechanisms to protect the natural environment on private land. However, the extent to which conservation covenants either explicitly require or al...

Increasing evidence demonstrates a role for the cross-habitat spillover process in the maintenance of biodiversity in managed agricultural landscapes. However, the mechanisms that drive this process are less well understood. In particular, it is critical to know how landscape structure modulates spillover movements, and whether species are moving t...

Context Amazonian white-sand ecosystems (campinas) are open vegetation patches which form a natural island-like system in a matrix of tropical rainforest. Due to their clear distinction from the surrounding matrix, the spatial characteristics of campina patches may affect the genetic diversity and composition of their specialized organisms such as...

Ecosystem services (ESs)-the benefits provided to people by nature-are fundamental to human well-being. The sustainable provision of such services is constrained by both spatial and temporal dynamics of ES supply (S) and demand (D), but the temporal aspect is usually disregarded despite its high relevance in sustainability analyses. Here, we propos...

The fulfilment of the benefits resulting from services provided by nature requires an integrated framework that combines appropriate ecosystem service governance with spatially explicit models of service provision. Here, we propose using a social‐ecological network approach to develop a ‘landscape governance framework’ that identifies how different...

Scientists have repeatedly argued that transformative, multiscale global scenarios are needed as tools in the quest to halt the decline of biodiversity and achieve sustainability goals. As a first step towards achieving this, the researchers who participated in the scenarios and models expert group of the Intergovernmental Science‐Policy Platform o...

Hantavirus Cardiopulmonary Syndrome (HCPS) is a disease with high human lethality rates, whose transmission risk is directly related to the abundance of reservoir rodents. In the Brazilian Atlantic forest, the main reservoirs species, Oligoryzomys nigripes and Necromys lasiurus, are thought to increase in abundance with deforestation. Therefore, fo...

ContextAs agricultural demands for land continues to expand, strategies are urgently needed to balance agricultural production with biodiversity conservation and ecosystem service provision in agricultural landscapes.Objectives We used a factorial landscape design to assess the relative contributions of forest proximity and local forest cover to be...

E cosystem restoration can provide multiple benefits to people and help to achieve multiple Sustainable Development Goals 1-3 , including climate change mitigation 4 and nature conservation 5. Thus, 47 countries have collectively committed to have 150 and 350 million hectares of degraded lands under restoration by 2020 and 2030, respectively, and h...

Scientists have repeatedly argued that transformative, multiscale global scenarios are needed as tools in the quest to halt the decline of biodiversity and achieve sustainability goals. As a first step towards achieving this, the Expert Group on Scenarios and Models of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Serv...

A group of scientists created in 2015 the Brazilian Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (BPBES), the first national-level initiative to emerge independently but inspired by the enterprise undertaken by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). The main goal of BPBES is to develop asses...

The expansion of monocultures and the overuse of agrochemicals have resulted in the loss of beneficial insects and disruption of ecosystem services such as pollination and biological control in agricultural landscapes. Bees, wasps and flower flies were our model groups to investigate how landscape structure attributes affect alpha and beta diversit...

Offsetting—trading losses in one place for commensurate gains in another—is a tool used to mitigate environmental impacts of development. Biodiversity and carbon are the most widely used targets of offsets; however, other ecosystem services are increasingly traded, introducing new risks to the environment and people. Here, we provide guidance on ho...

Este diagnóstico é o primeiro esforço nacional no âmbito da Plataforma Intergovernamental de Biodiversidade e Serviços Ecossistêmicos (IPBES). Teve como ponto de partida o documento Diálogos1 que foi utilizado como instrumento de consulta e diálogo com diferentes atores que, em suas atividades, direta ou indiretamente afetam ou são afetados pela bi...

Purpose of the Review The loss or gain of biodiversity and/or ecosystem functions and services can occur with a substantial delay following landscape change. We have first revisited the key concepts used to refer to those delayed ecological responses to landscape change and then reviewed the literature aiming to summarize (i) methodological approac...

Brazil's environmental legislation obliges private properties to retain a fixed proportion of their total area with native vegetation, the so-called “Legal Reserves”. Those areas represent practically one third of the country's native vegetation and are well known for their role in biodiversity protection and in the provisioning of a wide range of...

Habitat loss can trigger cascades of secondary extinctions, changing the organization of interacting assemblages. Until recently, most extinction models in interaction systems had limited ecological realism. Here, we estimate a realistic sequence of species extinctions resulting from habitat loss to assess its impacts on the structure of frugivory...

Resumo A legislação ambiental brasileira requer que as propriedades privadas mantenham uma proporção de sua área coberta com vegetação nativa, as chamadas Reservas Legais. Essas áreas representam praticamente um terço da vegetação nativa do país e são reconhecidas pelo seu importante papel na proteção da biodiversidade e na provisão de uma vasta ga...

Does landscape structure affect pollinator and natural enemy spillover? (meta-analytic approach)

Achieving ambitious global restoration commitments is a huge challenge. The Atlantic Forest Restoration Pact, created in 2009 as a movement to restore 15 Mha of degraded/deforested lands by 2050, pledged 1 Mha towards the 2020 Bonn Challenge. We documented the restoration of an estimated 673,510–740,555 ha of native forests from 2011 to 2015 in the...

Scientists have long been trying to understand why the Neotropical region holds the highest diversity of birds on Earth. Recently, there has been increased interest in morphological variation between and within species, and in how climate, topography, and anthropogenic pressures may explain and affect phenotypic variation. Because morphological dat...

Scientists have long been trying to understand why the Neotropical region holds the highest diversity of birds on Earth. Recently, there has been increased interest in morpho- logical variation between and within species, and in how climate, topography, and anthropogenic pressures may explain and affect phenotypic variation. Because morphological d...