Pedro Giovâni da Silva- PhD in Ecology
- Professor at University of Brasília
Pedro Giovâni da Silva
- PhD in Ecology
- Professor at University of Brasília
About
135
Publications
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Introduction
Ph.D. in Ecology, interested in metacommunity processes in different spatiotemporal scales. E-mail: pedrogiovanidasilva@yahoo.com.br
Current institution
Additional affiliations
March 2015 - February 2017
August 2011 - February 2015
March 2009 - February 2011
Education
August 2004 - January 2008
Publications
Publications (135)
Colored traps can attract or repel insect species, and effects vary among biological groups. Cerambycidae and Cetoniidae are diverse Coleoptera families of ecological and economic importance in forest and agro-ecosystems. Here, we assessed the effectiveness of different colors of aerial fruit-baited traps in capturing Cerambycidae and Cetoniidae be...
Iron Formations (IF) are threatened by mining, particularly the Mesovoid Shallow Substratum (MSS), an understudied subterranean environment. We evaluate the spatiotemporal patterns of subterranean fauna in MSS of iron duricrust (canga) in the Iron Quadrangle and Southern Espinhaço Range, southeastern Brazil. Samplings took place between July 2014 a...
Unraveling the spatiotemporal dynamics of communities is critical to understand how biodiversity responds to global changes. However, this task is not trivial, as these dynamics are quite complex, and most studies are limited to few taxa at small local and temporal scales. Tropical mountains are ideal indicators of biodiversity response since these...
Understanding the processes and mechanisms that underlie the spatiotemporal patterns of biodiversity is of paramount relevance, given the ongoing global climate and land cover changes. Here, we investigated the influence of season‐related climatic variables on two dimensions of dung beetle diversity (taxonomic and functional) and at different scale...
Iron Formations (IF) are among the most threatened environments due to the extensive mining activities. Mesovoid Shallow Substratum (MSS) in IF represents a poorly known subterranean environment and evaluating its fauna has the potential for expanding knowledge about the distribution of troglobiotic populations. We evaluated the spatiotemporal dist...
The Earth's most diverse group of organisms is facing an imminent crisis, as recent investigations suggest a remarkable decline in insect diversity. Within this context, altimontane forest islands might emerge as important refuges holding an invaluable diversity of species that would be doomed to disappear. Here, we aimed to examine the impact of f...
The Neotropical region hosts the highest diversity of dung beetles worldwide, linked to the diversity of mammals that thrive in the ecosystems of this region, particularly in its extensive tropical forests. The large amount of feces produced by herbivorous and omnivorous mammals in the natural and modified ecosystems of the Neotropical region is us...
Aim
We evaluated the effects of forest island size, isolation and area in the landscape driving temporal changes of insect biodiversity in a mountaintop forest archipelago. We expected that (i) in smaller, less isolated forest islands, changes in insect composition are more prominent, primarily driven by gains over time; (ii) more forest in the lan...
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...
Understanding community assembly in habitat patches requires an integrative approach, considering the potential role of local and regional factors and organisms' dispersal abilities among patches. For this, assessing the degree of species overlap between patches (nestedness) can be particularly informative, especially regarding different taxa and d...
We evaluated short-(among months within-years) and long-term (between 1999-2000 and 2016-2017) temporal patterns of taxonomic and functional β-diversity (and its components of substitution and gain/loss) of dung beetle assemblages in forest fragments and pastures in the Los Tuxtlas Biosphere Reserve (LTBR). Habitat type affected the taxonomic dissi...
Temperature affects the body size of animals, which is an important trait in natural and sexual selection. Insects do not have complex mechanisms of temperature control, thus temperature changes affect their life aspects, from enzymatic reactions to behavior. The amount of fat stored by insects is also influenced by temperature and constitutes a ti...
Introduction
The standardization of sampling protocols is imperative for robustly studying any taxonomic group. Replicable methods allow the comparison of data between different spatial and temporal studies. In the case of dung beetles, one of the best-studied indicator groups in analyses of environmental disturbance, a wide range of collection met...
Understanding how human‐modified landscapes affect the phylogenetic composition and assembly mechanisms of biological communities is critical for effectively managing and restoring tropical ecosystems. We evaluated how forest coverage loss, fragmentation and landscape heterogeneity affect the phylogenetic diversity of dung beetles and their assembl...
Livestock is a globally widespread farming practice, with benefits and harms for biodiversity. Biodiversity responses to vegetation and soil conditions associated with cattle grazing removal are poorly understood in tropical grassy ecosystems, especially in a long-term chronosequence. In this study, we aimed to identify the main drivers of local co...
Dry forests in the Caatinga biome of Brazil are seasonal ecosystems where diversity is driven by water availability. Understanding how the distribution of communities is driven by temporal climate changes has intrigued researchers for decades. However, temporal diversity patterns should be more evident in dry environments, since seasonality is char...
Regional biogeographical patterns result from a complex combination across habitat, climate and environmental variables. Biotic and abiotic variables strongly influence the diversity and spatial distribution pattterns. However, very few studies analyse the close interaction and effect of environmental variables on diversity at fine spatiotemporal s...
en
• Bats are one of the most species-rich mammal groups in the Tropics. This highly radiated group embodies many distinct ecomorphological traits, prompting their functional diversity. Furthermore, bat assemblages typically have high beta-diversity due to distinctive compositions across geographic gradients.
• We aimed to understand the distribut...
1. Restoration of disturbed environments in which soil surface layers have been removed is challenging and its success depends on the characteristics of the exposed soil layers and neighbour organisms. Dung beetles are important elements in the restoration of degraded habitats as secondary seed dispersers.
2. In this study, we first assessed how th...
Naturally fragmented landscapes are adequate systems for evaluating patterns and mechanisms that determine species distribution without confounding effects of anthropogenic fragmentation and habitat loss. We aimed to evaluate an ant metacommunity's spatiotemporal patterns in montane forest islands amid a grassland-dominated matrix. We assessed thes...
en Tropical dry forests (TDFs) are one of the most threatened ecosystems worldwide. Two hypotheses have been proposed to explain the origin of TDFs in South America: the Amazonian TDF hypothesis and the Pleistocene Arc hypothesis (PAH). There is a need to evaluate the distribution patterns of different organisms across the TDF distribution. We test...
Urbanization is increasing globally and causing rapid taxonomic and functional changes in biological communities. Its effects through time in the same communities have not been addressed properly. Here, we evaluate the temporal changes in taxonomic and functional diversity of dung beetles between greenspace (Cerrado stricto sensu) and residential s...
The Amazon Rainforest is facing high rates of deforestation, leaving anthropogenically dominated landscapes across the Amazon. Understanding the biodiversity response to the effects of rainfall seasonality can provide important examples of how species may respond to drastic climate conditions in anthropogenic landscapes. Here, we sampled dung beetl...
We evaluated how the taxonomic and functional diversity of dung beetles responds to landscape fragmentation in Los Tuxtlas Biosphere Reserve (LTBR). We sampled dung beetle assemblages in 15 landscapes (spatial windows) representing a gradient of forest cover loss and evaluated the degree of forest fragmentation in each landscape. The percentage of...
Human activities, such as conversion and degradation of habitats, are modifying the natural ecosystems, causing biodiversity declines globally. However, the responses of many understudied biological groups are less clear. Here, we explore how spatial components of β-diversity (incidence-and abundance-based) of flower chafer beetles are influenced b...
Understanding the drivers underlying spatial and temporal changes of species distribution is a major and urgent challenge, given the scenario of increased climate and land use changes. The creation and maintenance of urban parks is an efficient conservation strategy in urbanized landscapes. In this study, we explore how spatiotemporal β-diversity c...
Understanding the drivers underlying spatial and temporal changes of species distribution is a major and urgent challenge, given the scenario of increased climate and land use changes. The creation and maintenance of urban parks is an efficient conservation strategy in urbanized landscapes. In this study, we explore how spatiotemporal β-diversity c...
Anthropogenic activity, such as conversion and degradation of habitats, is causing global biodiversity declines. However, our understanding of how local ecological communities are responding to these changes taxonomically and functionally is still limited. The effects of the replacement of native by introduced pastures on biodiversity are some of t...
Anthropogenic activity, such as conversion and degradation of habitats, is causing global biodiversity declines. However, our understanding of how local ecological communities are responding to these changes taxonomically and functionally is still limited. The effects of the replacement of native by introduced pastures on biodiversity are some of t...
Global sustainability rests on a myriad of benefits provided by natural ecosystems that support human livelihoods and well-being, from biodiversity persistence to climate regulation. The undeniable importance of conserving tropical forests has drawn most of the conservation spotlight towards it. However, open ecosystems such as the Brazilian Campo...
The drivers of dissimilarity in biological communities among habitats and the mechanisms that modulate the distribution of functional diversity in streams are still important gaps in ecological knowledge. This study was designed to assess how the taxonomic and functional composition of Cerrado stream insect assemblages are distributed among multipl...
Nestedness is widely observed in natural metacommunities, but its underlying mechanisms are still poorly understood. The distribution of habitats in the landscape and differences in dispersal rates of distinct insect taxa can determine the nestedness of the metacommunity. Here, we evaluated how species habitat specialization contributes to metacomm...
Nestedness is widely observed in natural metacommunities, but its underlying mechanisms are still poorly understood. The distribution of habitats in the landscape and differences in dispersal rates of distinct insect taxa can determine the nestedness of the metacommunity. Here, we evaluated how species habitat specialization contributes to metacomm...
• We investigated the patterns of taxonomic (TD) and functional (FD) α and β‐diversities of ants in a mountainous landscape along three dimensions, namely one temporal (seasonal) and two spatial dimensions: between habitats – grassland and forest habitats (horizontal), and among elevation bands (vertical). In addition, we tested the effects of envi...
Dung beetle species were collected between May 2016 and July 2017 with pitfall traps baited with human feces in four Atlantic Forest sites with different levels of disturbance in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, southern Brazil. We sampled 5,535 individuals belonging to 46 species. Canthidium aff. trinodosum (20.71%), Eurysternus parallelus Castelna...
Dung beetles are insects involved in the organic matter cycle, providing services in ecosystem functions through their feeding and reproductive behavior. Environmental degradation of the Atlantic Forest in Brazil causes a decrease in species richness, which may affect ecosystem processes. However, many of the characteristics related to the ecologic...
1. The habitat heterogeneity hypothesis predicts that heterogeneous habitats may provide more niches and diverse ways of exploiting environmental resources, thereby allowing more species to coexist, persist and diversify.
2. We aimed to investigate how an edge‐interior gradient related to forest complexity influences species composition, abundance...
Amazon rainforest is facing several threats due to anthropogenic activities causing loss of habitat, species, and ecosystem functions. However, several areas are being abandoned after anthropic use allowing secondary succession to occur, which can lead to the passive restoration of community parameters that have been lost. We aimed to investigate t...
The millennial‐scale evolutionary relationships between mammals and dung beetles have been eroded due to several drivers of contemporary biodiversity loss. Although some evidence of co‐decline has been shown for mammals and dung beetles at some Neotropical sites, a biome‐scale analysis for the entire Atlantic Forest of South America would strengthe...
Metacommunity theory is a convenient framework in which to investigate how local communities linked by dispersal influence patterns of species distribution and abundance across large spatial scales. For organisms with complex life cycles, such as mosquitoes, different pressures are expected to act on communities due to behavioral and ecological par...
Understanding the mechanisms underpinning spatiotemporal diversity patterns of biological communities is a major goal of ecology. We aimed to test two ecological hypotheses: (i) temporal patterns of β-diversity will mostly be driven by nestedness, with a loss of species from summer to winter, and (ii) nestedness values will correlate with climatic...
1. Disturbance is a strong driver of community assembly and fire has long been recognised as one of the main disturbances of terrestrial ecosystems. This study tested the resilience of dung beetles to fire events in campos rupestres, which is a tropical savanna ecosystem that evolved under a frequent fire regime, by assessing the resistance and rec...
Human activities are causing a rapid loss of biodiversity, which impairs ecosystem functions and services. Therefore, understanding which processes shape how biodiversity is distributed along spatial and environmental gradients is a first step to guide conservation and management efforts. We aimed to determine the relative explanatory importance of...
Basic characteristics of species assemblages are frequently related to temperature variables recorded at a coarse-grained scale. In this study, 15 min instant-measurements of environmental and soil temperatures were recorded during 1 year in six Atlantic Forest sites of southern Brazil, ranging from 250 to 1,630 m a.s.l. These measurements were use...
The interaction between land use and climate change is expected to strongly affect species distributions along high elevation landscapes. We aimed to test the effect of climatic variables on community metrics among five types of land use in a high elevation landscape. We described dung beetle spatial and temporal taxonomic and functional diversity...
Dung consumption and removal is a fundamental ecological process carried out by dung beetles that drive soil nutrient cycling and associated ecosystem services. In this study, the removal rate of small droppings by dung beetles was estimated in natural subtropical rainforests of southern Brazil located along an elevational gradient, in order to und...
Subspecies is a debated taxonomic rank that, in some cases, could indicate that a speciation process is taking place. Studying the degree of co-occurrence among subspecies along environmental gradients may help to determine its taxonomic status. In this study, we explore the distribution of two subspecies of Canthon rutilans along spatio-temporal a...
Naturally fragmented landscapes provide suitable scenarios through which to investigate patch and landscape effects on biodiversity patterns in areas that are isolated from the disturbances usually associated with human-made fragments. We aimed to investigate the patch and landscape effects on the diversity of forest-dependent and matrix-tolerant d...
Aim
We investigated changes in dung beetle β‐diversity components along a subtropical elevational gradient, to test whether turnover or nestedness‐related processes drive the dissimilarity of assemblages at spatial and temporal scales.
Location
An elevational gradient (200–1,600 m a.s.l.) of the Atlantic Forest in southern Brazil.
Methods
We inve...
β‐diversity is key in understanding how ecological communities have been assembled across spatiotemporal scales. Separating β‐diversity into its process‐related components can provide richer insights into biodiversity organization. In this study, we aimed to investigate the spatial and temporal patterns of β‐diversity components in the composition...
Aim
We aimed to test whether contributions of individual species (SCBD) and contributions of single sites (LCBD) to overall beta diversity can be predicted by species metrics and species characteristics and also by community metrics and ecological variables, respectively.
Location
A mainland‐island landscape in the southern Brazilian Atlantic Fore...
β-diversity is a key measure to understand biodiversity patterns across spatial and temporal scales.
In this study, two published datasets on dung beetle (Coleoptera: Scarabaeinae) from Brazilian Pampa are
re-analyzed aiming to investigate the role of β-diversity process-related components based on composition and
abundance-based approaches for bot...
Species diversity can be a result of environmental and spatial constrains that act at small and large spatial scales. An important question in community ecology is to know the contribution of each one in studies with multiple spatial scales. We examined aquatic insect assemblages in small streams from the Atlantic Forest in a mainland-island scenar...
O trabalho objetivou avaliar os efeitos de diferentes preparos do solo e coveamentos na implantação de um pomar de nogueira-pecã Carya illinoinensis (Wangenh.) K. Koch (Juglandaceae), através da fauna da Ordem Coleoptera. O pomar de nogueira-pecã foi implantado em fevereiro de 2012, em espaçamento de 7 m x 7 m, em Santa Maria, RS, em delineamento d...
São Joaquim National Park (SJNP), in southern Brazil, covers large areas of high-altitude grasslands (HAG), which are a conspicuous ecosystem that belongs to the Atlantic Forest domain. Previous studies recorded 6 species of dung beetles (Coleoptera, Scarabaeinae) in SJNP. Dung beetles were sampled using a standardized protocol (baited pitfall trap...
Neste estudo, investigamos as mudanças nos componentes da diversidade beta (substituição e aninhamento) de Scarabaeinae (Coleoptera) para verificar a importância relativa de processos relacionados à substituição de espécies e aninhamento nos padrões de dissimilaridade das assembleias, espacialmente (entre sítios em diferentes altitudes) e temporalm...
A diversidade beta é uma medida fundamental para a compreensão de como as comunidades estão estruturadas espacialmente e temporalmente. Separar a diversidade beta em seus componentes relacionados a processos pode proporcionar um entendimento aprimorado da organização da biodiversidade. Os sistemas continente-ilha são cenários úteis para investigar...
The dung beetle, Scybalocanthon nigriceps (Harold, 1868), is recorded in Rio Grande do Sul state, Brazil, for the first time, at the Moreno Fortes Biological Reserve, municipality of Dois Irmãos das Missões, northwest region of the state, expanding the area of occurrence and distribution of this species in the country.
Ovitraps are generally used to collect immatures of Culicinae (Diptera: Culicidae). This study reports eight species of beetles found in ovitraps placed in an Atlantic Forest fragment in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Southern Brazil. Seven species were classified in the family Scarabaeidae (subfamily Scarabaeinae), and one species in the family H...
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...
Os besouros da subfamília Scarabaeinae (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae) são um grupo diverso de insetos distribuídos globalmente, com maior diversidade em florestas e savanas tropicais. Os escarabeíneos consomem principalmente fezes de mamíferos, carcaças e material vegetal em decomposição, participando assim nos processos de decomposição da matéria orgâ...
A temperatura pode atuar como uma limitação na distribuição espacial das espécies, assim, este trabalho visa descrever a resposta térmica de duas subespécies de Canthon rutilans ao longo de um gradiente altitudinal em áreas de Mata Atlântica. Se realizaram coletas mensais, de junho/2015 a maio /2016, em seis áreas entre 200 e 1600 m de altitude (Sa...
The Brazilian Atlantic Forest is one of the most diverse environments, but it is also one of the most threatened areas in terms of loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services. Assessment of changes in the community structure during the recovery of forests can be performed using indicator organisms. Dung beetles perform several ecological functions...
The Brazilian Atlantic Forest is one of the world's biodiversity hotspots, and is currently highly fragmented and disturbed due to human activities. Variation in environmental conditions in the Atlantic Forest can influence the distribution of species, which may show associations with some environmental features. Dung beetles (Coleoptera: Scarabaei...
Ataenius picinus Harold, 1868 is a scarab beetle, which is distributed worldwide. Individuals of this species have been found associated with animal feces, soil samples, leaf litter and decaying fruit, as some cases on carcasses. In this study, we propose the extension of trophic niche of this species based on observations of alternative scavenging...
Patterns of species richness, abundance, diversity, equitability and dominance, and the organization in feeding and behavioral guilds of Scarabaeinae fauna were analyzed in three different vegetation types (forest, native field and crop) in northwestern of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, among September and November 2012, with the use of pitfall traps b...
An extensive literature review was performed to determine the list of Aphodiinae species reported in Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina states. A total of 35 Aphodiinae species belonging to two tribes and 12 genera have been recorded in southern Brazil. Twenty-nine species (82.8%) were recorded in Santa Catarina and 16 (45.7%) in Rio Grande do Su...
A primary goal of community ecologists is to understand the processes underlying the spatiotemporal patterns of species distribution. Understanding the dispersal process is of great interest in ecology because it is related to several mechanisms driving community structure. We investigated the mobility of dung beetles using mark-release-recapture t...
Community structure is driven by mechanisms linked to environmental, spatial and temporal processes, which have been successfully addressed using metacommunity framework. The relative importance of processes shaping community structure can be identified using several different approaches. Two approaches that are increasingly being used are function...
Understanding the processes generating beta diversity is a major goal of community ecology. Metacommunity theory brings new ways of thinking about the structure of local communities, including processes occurring at different spatial scales. In addition to new theories, new methods have been developed which allow identification of distribution patt...
http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-7925.2014v27n4p63
O objetivo deste trabalho foi comparar a riqueza, abundância e diversidade das espécies de Scarabaeidae em duas fitofisionomias (campo e floresta) e verificar se variação sazonal ao longo do ano está relacionada com variáveis climáticas. O estudo foi desenvolvido na Reserva Biológica de São Donato,...
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...
Understanding the ecological mechanisms driving beta diversity is a major goal of community ecology. Metacommunity theory brings new ways of thinking about the structure of local communities, including processes occurring at different spatial scales. In addition to new theories, new methods have been developed which allow the partitioning of indivi...
Submetido em 04/03/2014 Aceito para publicação em 23/06/2014 Resumo Escarabeíneos em áreas de mineração de carvão em processo de recuperação. Besouros escarabeíneos sensíveis a modi¿caç}es ambientais podem apontar a recuperação de ireas degradadas. Este trabalKo obMetivou registrar e comparar as comunidades de Scarabaeinae em ireas com diferentes p...
Scarabaeinae specimens were collected with the use of pitfall traps baited with human excrement, rotten meat and rotting banana, between May 2009 and April 2010, in three forest fragments in Santa Maria, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil: 'Morro do Elefante' (MOEL), 'Morro do Cerrito' (MOCE) and 'Campus da Universidade Federal de Santa Maria' (UFSM). A tot...
Scarabaeinae specimens were collected with the use of pitfall traps baited with human excrement, rotten meat and rotting banana, between May 2009 and April 2010, in three forest fragments in Santa Maria, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil: ‘Morro do Elefante’ (MOEL), ‘Morro do Cerrito’ (MOCE) and ‘Campus da Universidade Federal de Santa Maria’ (UFSM). A tot...
This work presents a survey of Scarabaeinae species from a natural grassland area in Bagé, state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Samplings were carried out with fight intercept traps and pitfall traps baited with human feces, rotten banana and rotten meat, from December 2005 to November 2006. A total of 4,573 individuals, belonging to 14 genera and 3...
O ecossistema de restinga vem sofrendo considerável degradação ambiental, uma vez que a maioria das grandes cidades está localizada na costa brasileira. Contudo, estes sistemas não são tratados como áreas prioritárias de conservação, pois possuem poucas espécies endêmicas e a pressão para a ocupação de novos espaços em zonas litorâneas é cada vez m...
The aim of this study was to investigate the attractiveness of different types of bait to the Scarabaeinae. Scarabaeinae fauna was sampled using pitfall traps in 3 forest fragments of Santa Maria, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, between May 2009 and Apr. 2010. Each habitat received 27 traps placed on 3 transects, each containing 3 sets of 3 traps, respe...
This work presents a survey of Scarabaeinae species from a natural grassland area in Bage, state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Samplings were carried out with flight intercept trap and pitfall traps baited with human feces, rotten banana and rotten meat, from December 2005 to November 2006. A total, of 4,573 individuals, belonging to 14 genera and...
The fauna of Scarabaeinae (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae) was sampled using pitfall traps baited with human excrement and rotten fish in forest fragments in Silveira Martins, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, from November 2010 to January 2011. A total of 1,611 individuals were sampled, belonging to six tribes, 11 genera and 28 species. The most abundant speci...
Questions
Question (1)
I am working with several datasets coming from studies located along a latitudinal gradient and would like to relate alpha diversity (i.e. species richness) to latitude (and other abiotic variables). So what would be the best approach to correct species richness values taking into account the different sampling effort (i.e. total number of traps used in each study) in a GLM? Would estimating species richness using extrapolation (i.e. iNEXT) for a similar value of sample size or sample coverage be the best alternative? Thanks.
