Lages Fernanda

Resource specialist herbivores may suppress antipredator strategies to access scarcely available key resources, while proactive antipredator behaviors should be favored by generalists or when resources are abundant. We quantified the relative effects of predation‐ (top‐down) and resource‐driven (bottom‐up) constraints on spatiotemporal patterns of...

The Angolan Planalto and adjacent areas are characterised by flammable grassy ecosystems. Within these old-growth grasslands, geoxyles are a dominant component and play a key role in the functioning, diversity and beauty of these ecosystems. Geoxyles are a plant life form characterised by having low aboveground biomass and massive belowground woode...

The Kaokoveld Centre of Endemism is a hotspot of biodiversity and endemism, largely underexplored while new species are continually described. A reconnaissance survey of flora and vegetation was undertaken on three remote mountain tops of the western Great Escarpment: Cafema and Tchamalindi in Angola’s Iona National Park, and Middelberg in the Otji...

Proactive antipredator behavior results from a mental construct of perceived predation risk, and drives prey’s strategies to avoid being killed while minimizing constraints to their activities. Under this reasoning, resource specialists may suppress antipredator strategies to access scarcely available key resources, while proactive antipredator beh...

Angola is a tropical country with many biogeographical units and, therefore, has a high floristic diversity. Although an increasing number of floristic studies has been carried out in Angola in recent years, the country is still considered to be underinvestigated as many species being collected were previously unknown there. Several scientific grou...

Fire plays an important role in the ecology of tropical grasslands globally. However, detailed studies comparing the response of plant functional groups to fire seasonality, and thus phenological timing, are scarce from humid Afrotropical grasslands. Such information, however, is crucial for understanding what keeps the grasslands open and for enab...

In Southern Angola, numerous non-woody forest products are sold at local markets, namely in Lubango (Huíla Province). Such is the case of herbaceous wild plants, locally known as lombi , which are sold fresh throughout the year and cooked as a vegetable. Although these wild leafy vegetables are commercialized and widely used in local food, there is...

This report is an output of the SCIONA project "Co-designing conservation technologies for Skeleton Coast-Iona Transfrontier Conservation Area (Angola – Namibia)". The SCIONA project’s overarching aim was to strengthen cross-border ecosystem management and wildlife protection in the newly established Iona – Skeleton Coast Transfrontier Park through...

https://conservationnamibia.com/articles/cn2021-helicopter-science.php There are few places left on earth that scientists haven't visited to collect and study fauna and flora. Unexplored places invoke images of the deep ocean, inaccessible parts of Antarctica, or the highest mountains on Earth. It may come as a surprise that there are a few almost...

Despite its importance for carbon stocks accounting, belowground biomass (BGB) has seldom been measured due to the methodological complexity involved. In this study, we assess woody BGB and related carbon stocks, soil properties and human impact on two common suffrutex grasslands ( Brachystegia - and Parinari grasslands) on the Angolan Central Plat...

The miombo region in Africa is covered by a mosaic of woodlands and geoxylic grasslands and is subject to disturbances such as fires, frost and drought, and low nutrient availability. The dominance of Fabaceae Detarioideae species in miombo ecosystems is remarkable but little understood. We therefore compared plant functional traits (PFTs) of commo...

The civil unrest that ravaged Angola for nearly 30 years took a heavy toll on the country's wildlife, and led to a lengthy absence of reliable information for many threatened species, including the cheetah Acinonyx jubatus and African wild dog Lycaon pictus . Using camera trapping we assessed the status of these two species in two areas of southern...

Geoxyles and their congeneric tree species are a very common feature in the Zambezian Floristic Region, however , little is known about differing expression of plant functional traits between the two life forms and thus their evolutionary adaptations to prevailing habitat conditions. Therefore, we measured selected plant functional traits and compa...

Geoxyles and their congeneric tree species are a very common feature in the Zambezian Floristic Region, however , little is known about differing expression of plant functional traits between the two life forms and thus their evolutionary adaptations to prevailing habitat conditions. Therefore, we measured selected plant functional traits and compa...

The Zambezian Floristic Region (ZFR) in south-central Africa experienced major environmental changes in the past and is nowadays home to numerous woody taxa of wet-tropical provenance. Within many taxa, we observe adaptations to multiple habitats, but know little about their environmental drivers. In order to gain knowledge about adaptation and spe...

The importance of museum and herbarium collections is especially great in biodiverse countries such as Angola, an importance as great as the challenges facing the effective and sustained management of such facilities. The interface that Angola represents between tropical humid climates and semi-desert and desert regions creates conditions for diver...

Angola is a country full of opportunities. Few countries offer more exciting prospects for young scientists to discover and document the rich biodiversity, complex ecosystem processes and undescribed species of plants and animals that are to be found in its amazing diversity of landscapes and seascapes. The current expanding support of the Angolan...

This open access multi-authored book presents a 'state of the science' synthesis of knowledge on the biodiversity of Angola, based on sources in peer-reviewed journals, in books and where appropriate, unpublished official reports. The book identifies Angola as one of the most biologically diverse countries in Africa, but notes that its fauna, flora...

Report of the scoping trip of the SCIONA project in Angola. The SCIONA project aims to co-design conservation technologies for the new Iona - Skeleton Coast Transfrontier Conservation Park. The report gives an overview of this multi-disciplinary and exploratory research trip with an accent on the kick-off workshop in Moçâmedes and on the biophysica...

Southwestern Angola is a region characterized by contact between indigenous foragers and incoming food-producers, involving genetic and cultural exchanges between peoples speaking Kx’a, Khoe-Kwadi, and Bantu languages. Although present-day Bantu speakers share a patrilocal residence pattern and matrilineal principle of clan and group membership, a...

Southwestern Angola is a region characterized by contact between indigenous foragers and incoming food-producers, involving genetic and cultural exchanges between peoples speaking Kx′a, Khoe-Kwadi and Bantu languages. Although present-day Bantu-speakers share a patrilocal residence pattern and matrilineal principle of clan and group membership, a h...

The SASSCAL region is home to a very rich biodiversity, which provides significant economic and intrinsic value to human society. This biodiversity, however, is subject to multiple stresses emerging from human land use and climate change, which leads to biodiversity loss at substantial scale. To assess the current state and changes in biodiversity...

Eastern Angola and western Zambia are dominated by the Zambezi catchment, where high precipitation and a dense river network cause annual fl ooding of extensive areas from January to May. Cameia National Park in Angola is such a seasonally fl ooded savanna. A SASSCAL Biodiversity Observatory was established in May 2016, as little is known about the a...

Objectives: Southern Angola is a poorly studied region, inhabited by populations that have been associated with different migratory movements into southern Africa. Apart from Kx'a-speaking San foragers and Bantu-speaking pastoralists, ethnographic and linguistic studies have suggested the existence of an enigmatic array of pre-Bantu communities, l...

Southern Angola is a poorly studied region, inhabited by populations that have been associated with different migratory movements into southern Africa. Besides the long-standing presence of indigenous Kx’a-speaking foragers and the more recent arrival of Bantu-speaking pastoralists, ethnographic and linguistic studies have suggested that other pre-...

The western part of today’s Miombo region was strongly affected by the climatic changes at the Pliocene-Pleistocene boundary. Precipitation seasonality increased strongly, leading to the emergence of pronounced wet and dry seasons. Evergreen closed canopy forests disintegrated into a mosaic of open lands and dry forests. In this changing environmen...

TFO researchers presented their respective results concerning the targets to raise the awareness of people of the values of biodiversity (A1), to reduce the rate of loss of all natural habitats (B5), to enhance the area under conservation (C11), to enhance the contribution of biodiversity to carbon storage (D15) and to enhance the level of particip...

Previous studies evidenced in Saccharomyces cerevisiae the activity of a H(+)/glycerol symport, derepressed by growth on non-fermentable carbon sources, later associated with GUP1 and GUP2 genes. It was also demonstrated that only the combined deletion of GUP1, GUP2 together with GUT1 (glycerol kinase) abolished active transport in ethanol-induced...

Glycerol has been shown to cross the plasma membrane of Saccharomyces cerevisiae through (1) a H(+)/symport detected in cells grown on non-fermentable carbon sources, (2) the constitutively expressed Fps1p channel and (3) by passive diffusion. The Fps1p channel has been named a facilitator for mediating glycerol low affinity transport of the facili...

Many yeast species can utilize glycerol, both as a sole carbon source and as an osmolyte. In Saccharomyces cerevisiae, physiological studies have previously shown the presence of an active uptake system driven by electrogenic proton symport. We have used transposon mutagenesis to isolate mutants affected in the transport of glycerol into the cell....

Evidence is presented here that in Saccharomyces cerevisiae IGC 3507, grown either on glycerol, ethanol or acetate, glycerol is transported by a high affinity uptake system of the electrogenic proton symport type, with Km of 1.7±0.7 mM, Vmax 441±19 μmol h−1 g−1 dry weight and a stoichiometry of 1 : 1 proton per molecule of glycerol, at 30°C and pH...

Pichia sorbitophila, a yeast species that is highly resistant to osmotic stress in general and to salt stress in particular, was subjected to a mutagenesis strategy in order to obtain mutants deficient in the glycerol active uptake previously described. Density centrifugation was used for enrichment of NaCl sensitive mutants in either glucose or gl...

Pichia sorbitophila is a halotolerant yeast capable of surviving to extracellular NaCl concentrations up to 4 M in mineral medium when glucose or glycerol are the only carbon and energy sources. Evidence is presented here that glycerol, the main compatible solute this yeast accumulates so as to maintain osmotic balance, is actively co-transported w...

Two highly homologous genes related to a phenotype of salt stress tolerance were identified in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. These genes were named GUP1 and GUP2 from glycerol uptake (Holst et al, 2000). Upon salt stress, a strain lacking the capacity to sinthesize glycerol (gpd1gpd2) (figure 1) is able to increase intracellular levels of glycerol by t...