José Maria Cardoso Da Silva

University of Miami | UM · Department of Geography and Sustainable Development

From towers constructed at the interface between second-growth forest and an active and an abandoned pasture, we observed inter-habitat movements of fruit-eating birds in eastern Amazonia. The abandoned pasture was composed of grasses and forbs with a scattering of shrubs and small trees. The active pasture contained a low, uniform bed of grass. A...

The Amazon Forest is the most biodiverse region on earth and is central in the struggle to conserve biodiversity and control global warming. Biodiversity is not homogeneously distributed in the region, but concentrated within areas of endemism (AOE) that vary in size, degree of deforestation and human pressure. Unfortunately, these differences have...

Amazonia is the largest and most diverse of the tropical forest wilderness areas. Recent compilations indicate at least 40,000 plant species, 427 mammals, 1294 birds, 378 reptiles, 427 amphibians, and around 3,000 fishes. Not homogeneous in its plant and animal communities, it is an archipelago of distinct areas of endemism separated by the major r...

Aim To use the method of parsimony analysis of endemism to identify areas of endemism for passerine birds in the Atlantic Forest, South America, and to compare the locations of these areas with areas previously identified for birds as well as other taxa. Location The Atlantic Forest, eastern South America. Methods We analysed a matrix composed of t...

One of the main goals of modern sustainability science is to generate knowledge that societies can use to move toward more sustainable development pathways; however, there are few quantitative methods available to assess such pathways. This paper proposes a new index (the Sustainable Development Pathway Index, SDPI) that uses the Euclidean norm to...

Models suggest that extreme drought events induced by climate change can reduce the vegetation productivity of drylands and negatively influence millions of people living in these areas. However, the complexity of landscapes can moderate how much such events impact their vegetation productivity. Accordingly, more complex landscapes are expected to...

The Caatinga region, one of the world's most biodiverse tropical drylands, has been recently portrayed as an aggregate of closed biotas that do not interact despite being contiguous. Here, we demonstrate that, in contrast with this view, the Caatinga region is a dynamic and heterogeneous system whose major characteristics are shaped by multiple eco...

Understanding how species respond to habitat boundaries in a landscape is essential because such responses influence several ecosystem processes and services. However, most studies to date are focused on boundaries between natural and human-made ecosystems, with few investigating species' responses to boundaries between natural habitats. Using a tw...

The protection of the Brazilian Amazon is essential to prevent the collapse of global biodiversity and minimize the negative impacts of climate change worldwide. However, there is currently no estimate of how much it costs to conserve most of this region. We report that maintaining ∼80% (3.5 million km²) of the region within conservation areas (con...

Biotic interchange, speciation and extinction processes drive biotas assembling. However, the evolutionary outcomes of those mechanisms are complex and difficult to discriminate. Here, we investigate how these processes affect avian diversification in tropical forest regions and test the relative roles of vicariant speciation and biotic interchange...

Gallery forests are important to the maintenance of a substantial portion of the biodiversity in neotropical savanna regions, but management guidelines specific to this forest type are limited. Here, we use birds as study group to assess if: (1) functional traits can predict the abundance and occupancy of forest species within a savanna landscape,...

Private conservation lands are essential for protecting biodiversity, but few national‐level studies have assessed their coverage and the legal frameworks that support them. Here, we review the legal mechanisms enabling conservation on private lands in Brazil and evaluate these lands' potential to reinforce the national protected area system. We fo...

Protected areas (PAs) are the most effective public policy instruments to protect natural ecosystems and the services these ecosystems provide. Nevertheless, several PAs present a funding deficit because governments allocate fewer financial resources than those required to cover PA management costs. The variation in funding deficits within countrie...

One of the major challenges that modern societies face is improving their well-being, while reducing pressures on their immediate environments. One indicator that tracks this progress is the environmental intensity of well-being (EIWB), which measures how much stress is placed on the environment per unit of human well-being. In most studies, the va...

The ability of national governments to set and implement policies that protect biodiversity is currently facing widespread scepticism within the conservation movement. Here, we review the literature from several disciplines to outline a positive agenda for how the global conservation movement can address this. We combine the strengths of the people...

Finding a balance between ecosystem conservation and the production of goods and services that societies need to prosper is fundamental to the long-term sustainable development of any region, but this balance varies within the region’s landscapes. We tested the hypothesis that landscapes with intermediate structure complexity (i.e., those that comb...

The Brazilian Amazon harbours 70 % of the world's tropical forests and is essential to the country's economy because it maintains biodiversity, sustains the livelihoods of the indigenous people and local communities, and provides ecosystem services such as water production, soil stabilization, flood prevention, and climate regulation. In the last t...

Gazetting and maintaining protected areas (PAs) are political processes and, as such, depend on wider society’s support in order to achieve their aims. In this paper, we evaluated the influence of gender, education, age, income, place of origin and place of residence on public support for PAs in the Brazilian state of Amapá, a new tropical forest f...

Brazil hosts the largest expanse of tropical ecosystems within protected areas (PAs), which shelter biodiversity and support traditional human populations. We assessed the vulnerability to climate change of 993 terrestrial and coastal-marine Brazilian PAs by combining indicators of climatic-change hazard with indicators of PA resilience (size, nati...

In a world where changes in land cover and climate happen faster than ever due to the expansion of human activities, narrowly distributed species are predicted to be the first to go extinct. Studies projecting species extinction in tropical regions consider either habitat loss or climate change as drivers of biodiversity loss but rarely evaluate th...

Because of differences in energetic investments in reproduction, natural and sexual selection are expected to impact males and females differentially, driving the evolution of sexual dimorphism. Thus, males and females are predicted to also differ in how they respond to environmental stressors and how they restore and maintain body homeostasis. Oxi...

Establishing protected areas (PAs) is one of the most common land use policies implemented by governments to maintain healthy ecosystems at different spatial scales and in distinct socioeconomic settings. However, reliable knowledge on government spending in PAs and the factors that influence this spending is limited. In this study, we describe the...

Target 6 of the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity states that by 2020 at least 75% of production lands in each sector will be managed sustainably, consistent with the conservation of plant diversity. Target 11 stipulates that by 2020 no species of the wild flora will be threatened by int...

The geographical range of a species can change over time due to intrinsic or extrinsic factors, but the ecological niche of a species is hypothesized to be conservative and retained in time and space even during biological invasions. It has been documented that some species can experience niche shifts if natural barriers and other constraints are r...

We developed an indicator that defines priority municipalities in order to facilitate the deployment of preventive policies and strategies for ecosystem-based adaptation to climate change (EbA) in Brazilian municipalities. Based on the premises that poor people are the population most vulnerable to climate change and that conservation and sustainab...

Biodiversity conservation is a political process that requires sound national policies linked to ambitious global agreements. Good governance at the country level is required for successful conservation policies and programs. Environmental nongovernmental organizations can help countries to improve their governance and conservation policies by comb...

Amazonia is one of the world’s most vulnerable regions to climate change but few studies pinpointing priority areas for local adaptation programmes exist. This paper aims to identify socio-climatic hotspots among the 515 municipalities that compose the Brazilian Amazon by using a three-step process. First, we identified the regional social hotspots...

Although Amapá is the most protected Brazilian state, the same level of protection does not extend to its savannas. These are currently suffering increased pressure from threats including large-scale agriculture, particularly the expansion of soybean plantations. In September 2016, the Government of Amapá presented a zoning proposal (Zoneamento Soc...

Background The Brazilian Amazon is the world’s largest rainforest regions and plays a key role in biodiversity conservation as well as climate adaptation and mitigation. The government has created a network of protected areas (PAs) to ensure long-term conservation of the region. However, despite the importance of and positive advances in the establ...

Accessibility of the Brazilian Amazon federal protected areas Accessibility of PAs defined as the intersection between the total area of a PA with the area of a 10 km buffer adjacent to roads and rivers located within or outside PAs. (A) rivers and shoreline accessibility; (B) roads accessibility; and (C) overall and PAs accessibility.

Mann-Whitney U test results between the number of illegal activities in terrestrial and coastal/marine Brazilian Amazon federal PAs Comparison between the number of illegal activities in the Brazilian Amazon federal PAs, and the PA location (coastal/marine, n = 13; or terrestrial, n = 105). The test was run separately for all illegal activities, hu...

Population density of the Brazilian Amazon Population density map of the Amazon biome elaborated from the “Brazilian statistical grid” for visualization purposes.

Amazon federal protected areas evaluated and explanatory variables Amazon federal PAs evaluated (n = 118), Brazilian classification, IUCN classification, age in 2015, total area (km2), total number of illegal activities recorded (2010–2015), population density in a 50 km buffer from the perimeter of each PA and accessibility of a protected area (ac...

Categories and types of illegal activities Categorization of illegal activities considering the infraction framework, the number of occurrences of each type of infraction (according to Brazilian Federal Decree 6514 (2008)), and the main characteristics of illegal activities.

Spearman correlation results of explanatory variables

Illegal activities dataset Illegal activities dataset compiled and used in the study.

An Amazonian savanna in northern Brazil known as the Cerrado of Amapá is under imminent threat from poor land-use planning, the expansion of large-scale agriculture and other anthropogenic pressures. These savannas house a rich and unique flora and fauna, including endemic plants and animals. However, the area remains under-sampled for most taxa, a...

Infrastructure is usually defined as all elements of interrelated systems that provide goods and services essential to enabling, sustaining or enhancing societal living conditions. Although traditionally, infrastructure included only all human-made assets, since the 1980s, both scientists and conservationists have suggested that ecosystems should b...

The relationship between human welfare and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazonia has traditionally been thought to follow a boom-and-bust pattern. According to this pattern, forest clearing triggers rapid increases in human welfare levels (“the boom”) due to short-term economic gains; these levels then drop to below national or regional averages...

In tropical dry areas, rainfall is predicted to be the most important climatic variable influencing bird phenology because it triggers food and foliage production. In addition, because resources are scarce, the moulting and breeding seasons are not expected to overlap. We conducted a 2-year study on the phenology of passerine birds at one site in C...

Sustainable development can be defined as a development model that aims to achieve environmental conservation together with social inclusion and economic prosperity. It requires efficient management of two types of infrastructure: green and socio-economic. Over the last three decades, the Brazilian Government has been designing and implementing inn...

Studies to date suggest that most of the native vegetation in the Caatinga has remained relatively intact. In this chapter we have combined information from fire hotspots, roads, and land-use changes to demonstrate that at least 63.3% of the Caatinga is composed of anthropogenic ecosystems. Human impact is higher in the humid and more productive ec...

The Caatinga is a socio-ecological system where the mutual interdependence of man and nature is outstanding. On one hand, ecological gradients maintain most of the large biodiversity and have been fundamental in shaping the modern regional cultural heritage. On the other hand, acute and chronic human disturbances together have led to a large-scale...

The Caatinga is a well-recognized ecological region that lies in the semiarid hinterland of northeastern Brazil and that covers 912,529 km². The term ‘Caatinga’ refers mostly to a seasonally dry tropical forest (SDTF) that presents a mosaic of different physiognomies. The Caatinga is a very heterogeneous region that can be divided into nine ecoregi...

The Caatinga harbors 548 species 24of birds, of which 67 species or subspecies originated within the region. The regional avifauna has been assembled over time as a consequence of speciation in situ and biotic exchanges with the adjacent regions. The role played by regional mass extinction remains unknown. Local assemblages range from 90 to 259 spe...

This book provides in-depth information on Caatinga’s geographical boundaries and ecological systems, including plants, insects, fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. It also discusses the major threats to the region’s socio-ecological systems and includes chapters on climate change and fast and large-scale land-use changes, as well as...

Há dez anos, nós fizemos um balanço da situação da Mata Atlântica brasileira, avaliando seu status de conservação, ameaças, oportunidades e perspectivas. No capítulo do Livro " Metamorfoses florestais: Culturas, ecologias e as transformações históricas da Mata Atlântica " *, repetimos esse esforço, buscando avaliar os progressos obtidos, nos último...

The implementation of the Graduate Program in Tropical Biodiversity (PPGBIO) was a landmark that united four different institutions with the same goals (Universidade Federal do Amapá / UNIFAP, Instituto de Pesquisas Científicas e Tecnológicas do Estado do Amapá/IEPA, Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária/EMBRAPAAP and Conservation Internation...

Protected areas anchor the ecological infrastructure that societies need for long-term prosperity and provide benefits to local, national, and global stakeholders. However, these areas continue to go unfunded. In this paper, we have provided the first estimate of the return on investment for nine large protected areas that compose the core of the e...

Amazonia is the world's largest tropical forest. Because the planet is dominated by anthromes whose biodiversity and ecosystem services are limited, it is a competitive advantage for the Amazonian regional societies to build their socio-economic development strategies around conservation. Three large regional programs are outlined to promote a cons...

In this paper, we report the number of core and transient bird species in an Amazonian savanna site and assess their ecological differences. We conducted our study at Campo Experimental do Cerrado (CEC) da Embrapa-Amapa, 48 km north of Macapa (0 degrees 2'5 '' N / 51 degrees 2'2 '' W), Amapa, Brazil. Forty points were monitored on a monthly basis o...

Natural disturbances in tropical forests modify the availability and quality of resources and alter the patterns of bird distribution. These environmental changes increase the metabolic rate and disrupt the redox balance promoting oxidative stress. This study aimed to compare the abundance of Willisornis poecilinotus between gaps and the understory...

The neotropical primate family Pitheciidae consists of four genera Cacajao (uacaris), Callicebus (titis), Chiropotes (bearded sakis) and Pithecia (sakis), whose 40+ species display a range of sizes, social organisations, ecologies and habitats. Few are well known and the future survival of many is threatened, yet pitheciines have been little studie...

A criação do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Biodiversidade Tropical (PPGBIO) foi um marco histórico que uniu o esforço de quatro instituições distintas com os mesmos objetivos (Universidade Federal do Amapá, Instituto de Pesquisas Científicas e Tecnológicas do Estado do Amapá, Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária e Conservação Internacional)....

Introdução A Amazônia é uma das últimas grandes regiões naturais do planeta onde a extensão dos ecossistemas naturais ainda é maior do que a dos ecossistemas criados ou transfor-mados pelo homem. Com uma área total de 6.683.926 km 2 distribuídos em oito países da América do Sul, somente cerca de 20% da região foi desflorestado. A Amazônia represent...

As host nation of Rio+20, Brazil should choose the right course for its own development, say Fabio Scarano, André Guimarães and José Maria da Silva.

Rio +20, or the United Nations Conference for Sustainable Development, will take place at the end of this month of June 2012. In this paper, our central argument is that Brazil, as the host of Rio+20, has a historic opportunity to make the conference a success and take a decisive step in becoming a world leader in the shift from the traditional dev...

Knowledge of the avifaunal composition of Amazonian savannas is important in facilitating a greater understanding of the patterns of evolution of the regional biota. Despite this, this vegetation type has been poorly sampled in comparison to adjacent rainforest habitats. The aim of this paper is to provide an avifaunal inventory of the savannas and...

Situação de conservação: a maior parte da área está desprotegida, embora existam as seguintes unidades de conservação: Parque Nacional do Peruaçu; estação ecológica de Pirapitinga; Áreas de Proteção ambiental (aPas) Lajedão, Cavernas do Peruaçu, Serra do Sabonetal e Bacia do rio Pandeiros; Parques estaduais Verde grande, Lagoa do Cajueiro, Veredas...

The open vegetation corridor of South America is a region dominated by savanna biomes. It contains forests (i.e. riverine forests) that may act as corridors for rainforest specialists between the open vegetation corridor and its neighbouring biomes (i.e. the Amazonian and Atlantic forests). A prediction for this scenario is that populations of rain...

The region comprising Serra do Cachimbo in southern Pará on the border with Mato Grosso is one of Brazil’s most interesting regions from a biological standpoint. This complex landscape is an area of transition from the Amazonian Rainforest to the Cerrado of the Brazilian Central Plateau. Mosaics of vegetation can be found, which include dense rainf...

The geographical variation of three qualitative plumage characters and three body measurements of populations of the Scaled Woodcreeper (Lepidocolaptes squamatus), a species whose range is centered in eastern Brazil, is analyzed. Three distinctive populations are recognized (wagleri, squamatus, and falcinellus). Under the biological species concept...

Species occurrence and watershed matrix. Maps and additional data available at http://peixesraros.conservation.org.br. (0.74 MB XLS)

Background: Freshwaters are the most threatened ecosystems on earth. Although recent assessments provide data on global priority regions for freshwater conservation, local scale priorities remain unknown. Refining the scale of global biodiversity assessments (both at terrestrial and freshwater realms) and translating these into conservation priori...

)ofthe land surface in SouthAmerica,Africa,and Asia.Most people know these savannasbecause oftheir unique assemblages ofabundant and exquisitewildlife;however,they have only recently begun to receive thekind ofattention from a conservation viewpoint that hasbeen given to tropical rain forests (Myers et al.2000).Thelargest,richest,and possibly most...

This is a review of the main factors currently perceived as threats to the biodiversity of Amazonia. Deforestation and the expansion of the agricultural frontier go hand in hand within the context of occupation and land use in the region, followed by a hasty process of industrialization since the 1950s and, more recently, by a nation-wide attempt t...

One of the best examples of differentiation and hybridization among South American passerine birds is exhibited by Icterus cayanensis (Epaulet Oriole) and Icterus chrysocephalus (Moriche Oriole). Icterus chrysocephalus is a monotypic species restricted to northern South America. Icterus cayanensis is a polytypc species that ranges from Suriname and...