José Victor Alves Ferreira

• State University of Santa Cruz

Serra do Divisor National Park (SDNP) is a protected area located in the western Brazilian Amazon that is threatened by a pending bill proposing to downgrade its status and to build a road that would effectively slice the park in half. The biodiversity of SDNP is poorly understood and no dung beetle inventories have been conducted within the park t...

Agriculture has been globally responsible for biodiversity decay. Given that bees are key pollinators, their diversity reduction can affect biodiversity conservation and agricultural production. Although agricultural matrices have been reported as pervasive to bees, these effects are not always consistent and may vary according to evaluated paramet...

Traditional cocoa agroforests of southern Bahia in Brazil, locally known as “cabrucas”, are highly relevant for sheltering forest species, being thus recognized as a biodiversity-friendly agricultural system. However, despite their role in biodiversity conservation, little is known about the ability of cocoa agroforests to maintain social wasp asse...

Context The expansion of agricultural lands threatens biodiversity maintenance across the tropics. Although some agroforestry systems may be biodiversity-friendly, their conservation value likely depends on the landscape and regional contexts in which they are embedded—a poorly tested hypothesis. Objectives We assessed the conservation value of sh...

The genus Nealiolus Mason, 1974 (Hymenoptera: Braconidae, Brachistinae) is recorded for the first time in the Atlantic forest remnants and traditional cocoa agroforests, Theobroma cacao (Malvaceae) in the northeastern Brazilian region. A new species Nealiolus seb Silva, Shimbori & Fernandes sp. n. is described and named in honor of the “Sociedade E...

Hydropower development has become an important driver of habitat loss and fragmentation across lowland tropical forests. Despite ample evidence on the detrimental effects of insular habitat fragmentation on biodiversity, invertebrate taxa, that may be critical to ecosystem functioning, have been overlooked. We assessed the assemblage-level response...

Species relative abundance (SRA) is an essential attribute of biotic communities, which can provide an accurate description of community structure. However, the sampling method used may have a direct influence on SRA quantification, since the use of at-tractants (e.g., baits, light, and pheromones) can introduce additional sources of variation in t...

Social wasps play an important role in controlling agricultural pests. The present study aimed to investigate the differences in abundance, species richness and composition of social wasps (Vespidae: Polistinae) between a Cerrado legal reserve, edge and agricultural matrix in an agricultural farm in Mato Grosso, Brazil. We delimited three transects...

To preserve biodiversity, the Brazilian law postulates that rural properties must keep a percentage of native vegetation cover, denominated as “Legal Reserve” (LR). Recent political efforts are being made to disoblige the farmer to keep the LRs. In this study we evaluated the role of LRs in ensuring the ant biodiversity on LRs and soybean plantatio...

Increasing food production while preserving natural ecosystem services linked to native biodiversity is one of the most important societal challenges in the 21st-century. Natural pollination performed by bees significantly increases yields even in crops that do not strictly depend on animal pollination, such as soybean. However, several factors, su...

Agricultural expansions have major negative impacts on terrestrial biodiversity, directly affecting ecosystem services. Social wasps (Hymenoptera: Vespidae: Polistinae) actively participate in trophic balance in natural ecosystems and biological control of agricultural pests. In this work, we evaluated the richness and composition of social wasps i...