Joseph E Hawes

University of Cumbria · Institute of Science & Environment

Primates are among the most observable and best studied vertebrate order in tropical forest regions, with widespread attention dedicated to the feeding ecology of wild populations. In particular, primates play a key role as frugivores and seed-dispersal agents for a myriad of tropical plants. Sampling effort by primatologists, however, has been une...

The complex web of inter-relationships observed in nature that confronted early natural historians on their voyages to the tropics, inspired not only the theory of evolution by natural selection but also the development of ecology as a scientific discipline and set the foundation for the study of ecological networks. Modern network analyses owe muc...

Urgent challenges posed by widespread degradation in tropical ecosystems with poor governance require new development pathways to reconcile biodiversity conservation and human welfare. Community-based conservation management has shown potential for integrating socio-economic needs with conservation goals in tropical environments; however, assessing...

Quantifying the impact of habitat disturbance on ecosystem function is critical to understanding and predicting the future of tropical forests. Many studies have examined post‐disturbance changes in animal traits related to mutualistic interactions with plants, but the effect of disturbance on plant traits in diverse forests has received much less...

Primate dietary profiles have been the focus of a vast cumulative effort of observational field studies which now enable an enhanced level of comparative analysis. Attempts to classify dietary strategies into discrete categories inevitably lead to a loss of detail and often overlook geographic, seasonal, and other forms of variation. We review the...

Leaf and wood functional traits of trees are related to growth, reproduction, and survival, but the degree of phylogenetic conservatism in these relationships is largely unknown. In this study, we describe the variability of strategies involving leaf, wood and demographic characteristics for tree genera distributed across the Amazon Region, and qua...

We describe the geographical variation in tree species composition across Amazonian forests and show how environmental conditions are associated with species turnover. Our analyses are based on 2023 forest inventory plots (1 ha) that provide abundance data for a total of 5188 tree species. Within-plot species composition reflected both local enviro...

The breakdown of plant material fuels soil functioning and biodiversity. Currently, process understanding of global decomposition patterns and the drivers of such patterns are hampered by the lack of coherent large‐scale datasets. We buried 36,000 individual litterbags (tea bags) worldwide and found an overall negative correlation between initial m...

Amazonia’s floodplain system is the largest and most biodiverse on Earth. Although forests are crucial to the ecological integrity of floodplains, our understanding of their species composition and how this may differ from surrounding forest types is still far too limited, particularly as changing inundation regimes begin to reshape floodplain tree...

Aim: Amazonia hosts more tree species from numerous evolutionary lineages, both young and ancient, than any other biogeographic region. Previous studies have shown that tree lineages colonized multiple edaphic environments and dispersed widely across Amazonia, leading to a hypothesis, which we test, that lineages should not be strongly associated w...

A new species from the southwest Brazilian Amazon, Isocopris rossinii Arias-Buriticá, Bach, and Vaz-de-Mello, new species, is described along with a diagnosis, illustrations, and discussion of its taxonomic position in the genus. This new species is readily distinguished by a deep depression in the frons, a large and trapezoidal ventral clypeal pro...

The Brazilian state of Acre is located in the southwestern Amazon and it is characterized by a humid tropical forest vegetation that covers plains and mountains. Up to this point, the composition of termite species in the state is not known. The aim of this study was to provide a checklist of termite species or recognizable taxonomic units for the...

ARTICLE Mapping density, diversity and species-richness of the Amazon tree flora Using 2.046 botanically-inventoried tree plots across the largest tropical forest on Earth, we mapped tree species-diversity and tree species-richness at 0.1-degree resolution, and investigated drivers for diversity and richness. Using only location, stratified by fore...

Graphical abstract Highlights d Ecological metadata were compiled for 7,694 sites across the Brazilian Amazon d Accessibility and proximity to research facilities influenced research probability d Knowledge gaps are greater in uplands than in wetlands and aquatic habitats d Undersampled areas overlap predicted hotspots of climate change and defores...

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...

The Neotropical region hosts 4225 freshwater fish species, ranking first among the world's most diverse regions for freshwater fishes. Our NEOTROPICAL FRESHWATER FISHES data set is the first to produce a large‐scale Neotropical freshwater fish inventory, covering the entire Neotropical region from Mexico and the Caribbean in the north to the southe...

In a time of rapid global change, the question of what determines patterns in species abundance distribution remains a priority for understanding the complex dynamics of ecosystems. The constrained maximization of information entropy provides a framework for the understanding of such complex systems dynamics by a quantitative analysis of important...

Fruits and seeds are key food resources for most Amazonian mammals and birds. Selective logging is an increasingly dominant land use in the region that can deplete these resources over large areas. However, this potential impact remains poorly studied. Here we assess potential losses of animal-dispersed (endozoochorous and synzoochorous) trees resu...

Despite a global phase out of some point sources, mercury (Hg) remains elevated in aquatic food webs, posing health risks for fish-eating consumers. Many tropical regions have fast growing organisms, potentially short food chains, and few industrial point sources, suggesting low Hg baselines and low rates of trophic magnification with limited risk...

An extensive network of Protected Areas (PA) has been established across the Brazilian Amazon, but this PA system still suffers from a shortage of funding resources and environmental managers. New conservation strategies that successfully align social aspirations with biodiversity conservation are therefore imperative. Although approaches exist tha...

Conservation of freshwater biodiversity and management of human-wildlife conflicts are major conservation challenges globally. Human-wildlife conflict occurs due to attacks on people, depredation of fisheries, damage to fishing equipment and entanglement in nets. Here we review the current literature on conflicts with tropical and subtropical croco...

Significance Sustainable-use protected areas (PAs) have contributed to tropical biodiversity conservation by deterring deforestation in multiple countries, yet their social and economic benefits to local stakeholders remain poorly understood. Amazonia hosts the largest tropical PA system on Earth, which is intended to safeguard its rich biological...

O atual cenário global de perda de biodiversidade, destruição das florestas tropicais e mudanças no clima tem levado as sociedades a pensar com urgência em novos caminhos de desenvolvimento que contemplem a proteção dos sistemas naturais e as demandas sociais. A Amazônia aparece com destaque nessa discussão por abrigar as maiores diversidades bioló...

Populations of migratory waterbirds are facing dramatic declines worldwide due to illegal hunting, habitat loss and climate change. Conservation strategies to reverse these trends are imperative, especially in tropical developing countries, which almost invariably allocate insufficient levels of investment for environmental protection. Here, we com...

In a time of rapid global change, the question of what determines patterns in species abundance distribution remains a priority for understanding the complex dynamics of ecosystems. The constrained maximization of information entropy provides a framework for the understanding of such complex systems dynamics by a quantitative analysis of important...

Research Highlights: Rare, or sparsely distributed, species drive the floristic diversity of upland, terra firme and seasonally flooded forests in the central Juruá-a remote and hitherto floristically poorly known area in the Brazilian Amazon. Background and Objectives: Floristic inventories are critical for modelling and understanding the role of...

Mammalian carnivores are considered a key group in maintaining ecological health and can indicate potential ecological integrity in landscapes where they occur. Carnivores also hold high conservation value and their habitat requirements can guide management and conservation plans. The order Carnivora has 84 species from 8 families in the Neotropica...

Fragmented tropical forests can be highly dynamic, with the spatial configuration of forest patches changing through time. Yet, the lack of longitudinal studies limits our understanding of how patch dynamics affect biodiversity, especially when there is a time lag in species extinctions (extinction debt). We assessed how temporal changes in patch s...

The Amazon is the largest forest system on Earth, supporting a variety of indigenous societies, small farmers, extractivists, and artisanal fishers with different cultures and relations with wildlife. However, the Brazilian Amazon has lost more than 436,000 km² of forest in the last 30 years, and Protected Areas may not be enough to ensure the cons...

Plant traits—the morphological, anatomical, physiological, biochemical and phenological characteristics of plants—determine how plants respond to environmental factors, affect other trophic levels, and influence ecosystem properties and their benefits and detriments to people. Plant trait data thus represent the basis for a vast area of research sp...

Vulnerability to habitat fragmentation Habitat fragmentation caused by human activities has consequences for the distribution and movement of organisms. Betts et al. present a global analysis of how exposure to habitat fragmentation affects the composition of ecological communities (see the Perspective by Hargreaves). In a dataset consisting of 448...

Little is known about consumer productivity in the tropics despite the key feedbacks that animals impose on primary productivity. In the Amazon basin, seasonally flooded and unflooded forests exist side by side, and ants (Formicidae) dominate animal biomass. Although flooding has a direct negative effect on soil-dwelling ants, it is less clear whet...

• Pirarucu (Arapaima spp.) are the world's largest scaled freshwater fish, reaching 3 m in length and >200 kg in weight. Historical overfishing has devastated populations of this remarkable fish across Amazonian floodplains, but community‐based management programmes are now stimulating the recovery of wild populations. • Pirarucu have evolved a uni...

The effectiveness of Protected Areas (PAs) in reducing hunting pressure on mammal populations in tropical forests has rarely been examined at a community-wide level. In African forests, commercial and subsistence hunting are widespread, but assessments of mammal abundance and distribution patterns are often lacking. We investigated patterns of occu...

O Projeto Médio Juruá trabalha na Amazônia brasileira para apoiar a conservação comunitária e o manejo sustentável de recursos. Juntamente com organizações parceiras locais, nos concentramos aqui em duas iniciativas que empregam uma estratégia de zoneamento. Para a conservação e gestão dos recursos pesqueiros, incluindo o pirarucu (Arapaima gigas),...

Projeto Médio Juruá works in the Brazilian Amazon to support community-based conservation and sustainable resource management. Together with local partner organisations, we focus here on two initiatives that employ a zoning strategy. For the conservation and management of fish stocks, including the commercially valuable pirarucu (Arapaima gigas), o...

Understanding how ecological communities are structured is a major goal in ecology. Ecological networks representing interaction patterns among species have become a powerful tool to capture the mechanisms underlying plant-animal assemblages. However, these networks largely do not account for inter-individual variability and thus may be limiting ou...

Details of the species of plants and bees sampled, and members of the trait nodes

Bee-plant interactions and trait measurements used in our analysis

R code for constructing the trait-based networks

Patterns of habitat selection are influenced by local productivity, resource availability, and predation risk. Species have taken millions of years to hone the macro-and micro-habitats they occupy, but these may now overlap with contemporary human threats within natural species ranges. Wattled Curassow (Crax globulosa), an endemic galliform species...

Summary of IUCN Red List status for all Cracidae genera, with all curassows in bold. EW = Extinct in the wild, CR = Critically Endangered, EN = Endangered, VU = Vulnerable, NT = Near Threatened, LC = Least Concern.

Seasonal variation in home range size of the three monitored individuals of Crax globulosa in the Médio Juruá, Amazonas, Brazil. Solid and dashed lines represent the Adaptive Local Convex Hull (aLoCoH 95%) home ranges in wet and dry seasons, respectively.

The PREDICTS project—Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems (www.predicts.org.uk)—has collated from published studies a large, reasonably representative database of comparable samples of biodiversity from multiple sites that differ in the nature or intensity of human impacts relating to land use. We have used t...

Figure S1: Database schema. Diversity data in yellow, GIS data in green and Catalogue of Life data in blue. The diversity tables datasource, study, site, measuredtaxon and diversitymeasurement follow the structure described in ‘Methods’ in the main text and in Hudson et al. (2014): a datasource is associated with one or more study records, each of...

The PREDICTS project—Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems (www.predicts.org.uk)—has collated from published studies a large, reasonably representative database of comparable samples of biodiversity from multiple sites that differ in the nature or intensity of human impacts relating to land use. We have used t...

The PREDICTS project—Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems (www.predicts.org.uk)—has collated from published studies a large, reasonably representative database of comparable samples of biodiversity from multiple sites that differ in the nature or intensity of human impacts relating to land use. We have used t...

Floodplain forests comprise some of the defining and most enigmatic habitats of Western Amazonia. This chapter provides an overview of the multi-directional relationships between: forest structure and carbon stocks; fruit production and phenology; and frugivores and seed dispersal services, paying particular attention throughout to the role of the...

Few studies have successfully monitored community-wide phenological patterns in seasonally flooded Amazonian várzea forests, where a prolonged annual flood pulse arguably generates the greatest degree of seasonality of any low-latitude ecosystem on Earth. We monitored the vegetative and reproductive plant phenology of várzea (VZ) floodplain and adj...

Figure S1. A second dung beetle‐mammal interaction network, estimated from spatially explicit co‐occurrence data from the western Brazilian Amazon, from an independent, and simultaneously collected dataset (see Methods). Overall network size (S) = 22 (17 consumer and five producer species), average number of links per species (L/S) = 1.27, and prop...

Predicting the functional consequences of biodiversity loss in realistic, multi-trophic communities remains a challenge. No existing biodiversity–ecosystem function study to date has simultaneously incorporated information on species traits, network topology, and extinction across multiple trophic levels, while all three factors are independently u...

Major hydroelectric dams are proliferating in tropical regions such as Amazonia, where extensive new hydropower developments are planned despite potentially severe ecological and social impacts. The status of freshwater biota in the vicinity of existing dams could be valuable to predict the effects of such developments, but detailed ecological moni...

Data S1. Data extract.

Biodiversity continues to decline in the face of increasing anthropogenic pressures such as habitat destruction, exploitation, pollution and introduction of alien species. Existing global databases of species’ threat status or population time series are dominated by charismatic species. The collation of datasets with broad taxonomic and biogeograph...

Constructing community fruit-frugivore networks has proved challenging in tropical forests to date, particularly in lowland Amazonia, which hosts the most diverse spectrum of frugivorous vertebrates and morphological fruit types worldwide. We assessed data on fruit resource production, frugivore assemblages and corresponding fruit-frugivore network...

Habitat fragmentation studies have produced complex results that are challenging to synthesize. Inconsistencies among studies may result from variation in the choice of landscape metrics and response variables, which is often compounded by a lack of key statistical or methodological information. Collating primary datasets on biodiversity responses...

Primates are among the most observable and best studied mammalian orders, yet the distribution of sampling effort by primatologists has inevitably concentrated on a few genera and a limited number of study sites. We present the first systematic review of sampling effort and associated biases in wild primate field research, focusing on dietary studi...

Hypotheses that relate body size to energy use are of particular interest in community ecology and macroecology because of their potential to facilitate quantitative predictions about species interactions and to clarify complex ecological patterns. One prominent size-energy hypothesis, the energetic equivalence hypothesis, proposes that energy use...

Methods for direct measurement of energy intake by frugivores. (PDF)

Measured values for density and population energy use by species. (PDF)

Accurate estimates of current forest carbon stocks are required for efforts to reduce emissions from tropical deforestation and forest degradation. The relative contributions of different vegetation types to carbon stocks and potential emissions are poorly understood in highly heterogeneous forest mosaics, and further field-based measurements are n...

The richness and resilience of tropical forest ecosystems are best described by the myriad of ecological interactions linking co-occurring species together. The many functions previously served by ecological links are often only detected once these links are lost. Of particular interest in this regard are the mutualistic networks between fruiting p...

1. The future of tropical forest species depends in part on their ability to survive in human-modified landscapes. Forest strips present a priority area for biodiversity research because they are a common feature of many managed landscapes, are often afforded a high level of legal protection, and can provide a cost-effective and politically accepta...

Background/Question/Methods A central focus of ecology is understanding patterns of resource acquisition and use, and body size may be a primary driver of resource consumption rates. The energetic equivalence rule predicts that abundance and metabolism will scale inversely with body size, and that therefore energy consumption rates of size classes...

The response of tropical fauna to landscape-level habitat change is poorly understood. Increased conversion of native primary forest to alternative land-uses, including secondary forest and exotic tree plantations, highlights the importance of assessing diversity patterns within these forest types. We sampled 1848 moths from 335 species of Arctiida...