Melina De Souza LeiteUniversity of São Paulo | USP · Department of Ecology (IB)
Melina De Souza Leite
PhD
Researcher and data scientist
https://melinaleite.weebly.com
About
27
Publications
11,845
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250
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
I am a researcher and data scientist in the Department of Ecology at the Institute of Biosciences, University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil.
I recently finished my PhD at the Laboratory of Theoretical Ecology of Dr. Paulo Inácio Prado at USP.
Currently, I work in different projects involving ecological data collection and analysis, using R language.
I am interested in ecological modeling and statistics for community ecology, landscape ecology, and conservation biology.
Additional affiliations
August 2010 - present
March 2003 - August 2009
Publications
Publications (27)
We evaluated the selection of resting sites occupied by the water opossum Chironectes minimus, between 2004 and 2010, in streams of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. Fourteen radio-tracked adult (males and females) opossums used natural cavities as resting sites. Opossums selected narrow river stretches and selected their resting sites mainly accordin...
There is good evidence that the results of a restoration program depend largely on the landscape context such as habitat cover, connectivity and isolation. Such evidence, however, is not coherently presented in the scientific literature. This review aims to provide an overview of how landscape ecology has been used in restoration projects in the la...
The activity of the water opossum Chironectes minimus was studied in Atlantic forest rivers in south-eastern Brazil using radiotracking, from October 2004 to October 2008. There were 439 nocturnal fixes of 11 males and four females. Activity patterns of the water opossum were compared among sexes and seasons, using linear and generalized linear mix...
We Studied the Population structure, spatial patterns, and activity patterns of the Water opossum (Chironectes minimus) via capture-mark-recapture and radiotelemetry from October 2004 to October 2006 ill Atlantic Forest streams in southeastern Brazil. We tested the hypothesis of reproductive seasonality, the usual pattern in neotropical marsupials,...
Aim: Global forests and their structural and functional features are shaped by many mechanisms that impact tree vital rates. Although many studies have tried to quantify how specific mechanisms influence vital rates, their relative importance among forests remains unclear. We aimed to assess the patterns of variation in vital rates among species an...
Ecology is a science that is constantly concerned with testing hypotheses or even understanding ecological processes from patterns in data, which are mostly described using statistical tools. Mixed-effects models are increasingly used in ecology given the hierarchical nature of most ecological data and are especially useful in partitioning sources...
1. Habitat loss represents a major threat to biodiversity, however, the modulation of their 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 resource availabi...
Abstract Biological data are often intrinsically hierarchical (e.g., species from different genera, plants within different mountain regions), which made mixed‐effects models a common analysis tool in ecology and evolution because they can account for the non‐independence. Many questions around their practical applications are solved but one is sti...
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...
Following recent evidence on gender bias at the publishing process in sciences, we present here a view on Oecologia Australis section editors, reviewers, and authors gender ratios to understand the patterns in this journal, improving the data assessment and discussions on this topic. We found that women section editors tended to accept more women t...
O capítulo faz parte da seção 5, intitulada "Os territórios indígenas e
tradicionais protegem a biodiversidade?", que por sua vez integra o livro "Povos Tradicionais e Biodiversidade no Brasil", organizado por Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, Sônia Barbosa Magalhães e Cristina Adams
A publicação está disponível em: http://portal.sbpcnet.org.br/livro/pov...
Biological data are often intrinsically hierarchical. Due to their ability to account for such dependencies, mixed-effect models have become a common analysis technique in ecology and evolution. While many questions around their theoretical foundations and practical applications are solved, one fundamental question is still highly debated: When hav...
Significance
This study highlights previously unknown patterns of tree longevity and growth across the world. Tree-ring data reveal a large-scale trade-off between tree longevity and growth, following global patterns of increasing forest productivity and biomass turnover rate from temperate to tropical regions. The oldest known trees live under dry...
Capítulo 19 - páginas 245-261
https://editora.ufabc.edu.br/ciencias-sociais/72-objetivos-do-desenvolvimento-sustentavel
Investigou-se como tamanho de propriedade, atividade econômica e grupo social relacionam-se com a cobertura de vegetação nativa em imóveis rurais do estado de São Paulo, avaliando implicações para políticas públicas para conservação ambiental. Foram analisados dados do Cadastro Ambiental Rural de São Paulo. Mais de um terço das propriedades não pos...
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...
The use of scenarios to evaluate restoration effects on biodiversity and ecosystem services (ES) is fundamental to improve restoration practices. Here we developed a systematic review to verify the existence of gaps and limitations in the use of scenarios for environmental restoration, and assess the state of the science of “restoration scenarios”...
Supplemental material of Leite et al. 2013.
Nós buscamos entender como tamanho de propriedade e grupo social se relacionam com a cobertura de vegetação nativa em imóveis rurais do estado de São Paulo, avaliando possíveis implicações para políticas públicas de desenvolvimento rural e conservação ambiental. Utilizamos dados das propriedades rurais cadastradas no Cadastro Ambiental Rural de São...
Para que programas governamentais e políticas públicas possam influenciar positivamente a conservação de paisagens rurais, é preciso inicialmente conhecimento sobre os fatores que influenciam na tomada de decisão sobre a conversão do uso da terra. Neste estudo buscamos entender como certas características socioeconômicas estão relacionadas com a co...
The water opossum Chironectes minimus is the world’s only semi-aquatic marsupial. It is considered rare, and it is reported on several regional conservation lists of species as either endangered or data deficient. Given its uniqueness and the poor knowledge of its ecology, we aimed to investigate home range size and overlap and habitat selection of...
The water opossum Chironectes minimus is the world’s only semi-aquatic marsupial. It is considered rare, and it is reported on several regional conservation lists of species as either endangered or data deficient. Given its uniqueness and the poor knowledge of its ecology, we aimed to investigate home range size and overlap and habitat selection of...
We reviewed information about the natural history of the water opossum Chironectes minimus and brought new data on a population studied in Atlantic Forest streams of Rio de Janeiro State, Brazil. The study was carried out from October 2004 to February 2011 using capture-mark-recapture and radiotelemetry techniques. We obtained 127 captures of 43 in...
Projects
Projects (3)
Our aim is to sustain a long-term mark-recapture study of population and community dynamics of Ithomiini butterflies in urban forest fragments in São Paulo, eastern Brazil. This forest dwelling butterfly tribe is remarkable for its chemical defences, warning colours, and mimetic relationships among them and with other groups of Lepidoptera. Ithomiini butterflies are also known by their role in inspiring the development of classical evolutionary theory by Henry W. Bates (1825-1892) and Fritz Müller (1822-1897). Our basic goals are to describe temporal patterns of abundance and species diversity and to get insights about the processes (e.g., niche, neutral) that shape these patterns. We are also interested in understand the regulation and plasticity of a seasonal behavior supposedly adaptative to desiccation, the "Ithomiini pockets" - dense multi-species aggregations (up to 10 ind. m²) observed in small, restricted areas of the forest during the dry season. We are taking advantage of an atypical mismatch between rainfall and photoperiod (usually strongly correlated) that ocurred in the first years of the study to test if aggregations are simple reactive responses to rainfall or there are internal time-keeping mechanisms involved. The data collection started in April 2013 as part of my PhD and since then we have been marking and recapturing butterflies on an unfailing monthly basis. We captured and marked so far nearly 20,000 adult individuals of 24 species. We are planning to extend our approach through collaborations and start a monthly larvae count, set experiments to understand the ecophysiology of the life-stages, and adopt new technologies to access organism-environmental relations in the field, at the individual level. We believe that this system is appropriate for a long-term monitoring program, and also an insightful model to study responses of organisms to changing environments, advancing our knowledge on the evolution of adaptative processes and on the effects of climate change.
