Renata L. Muylaert

Massey University ·  Hopkirk Institute

The Atlantic Forest in South America (AF) is one of the world’s most diverse and threatened biodiversity hotspots. We present a comprehensive spatiotemporal analysis of 34 years of AF landscape change between 1986-2020. We analyzed landscape metrics of forest vegetation only (FV), forest plus other natural vegetation (NV), and investigated the sens...

The wildlife and livestock interface is vital for wildlife conservation and habitat management. Infectious diseases maintained by domestic species may impact threatened species such as Asian bovids, as they share natural resources and habitats. To predict the population impact of infectious diseases with different traits, we used stochastic mathema...

Wild bovids provide important ecosystem services throughout their native range. In Asia, most are threatened with extinction. Five wild bovids remain in Thailand: gaur (Bos gaurus), banteng (Bos javanicus), wild water buffalo (Bubalus arnee), mainland serow (Capricornis sumatraensis) and Chinese goral (Naemorhedus griseus). However, their populatio...

Malaria is a prevalent disease in several tropical and subtropical regions, including Brazil, where it remains a significant public health concern. Even though there have been substantial efforts to decrease the number of cases, the reoccurrence of epidemics in regions that have been free of cases for many years presents a significant challenge. Du...

Malaria remains a significant public health problem worldwide, particularly in low-income regions with limited access to healthcare. Despite the use of antimalarial drugs, transmission remains an issue in Colombia, especially among indigenous populations in remote areas. In this study, we used an SIR Ross MacDonald model that considered land use ch...

Malaria is a prevalent disease in several tropical and subtropical regions, including Brazil, where remains a significant public health concern. Despite control efforts, reintroduction of endemics in areas without cases for decades poses a challenge. To assess factors influencing ma-laria risk, regional outbreak cluster analysis and a spatio-tempor...

The emergence of SARS-like coronaviruses is a multi-stage process from wildlife reservoirs to people. Here we characterize multivariate indicators associated with the risk of zoonotic spillover of SARS-like coronaviruses in different areas to help inform surveillance and mitigation activities. We consider direct and indirect transmission pathways b...

Mammals are charismatic organisms that play a fundamental role in ecological functions and ecosystem services, such as pollination, seed dispersal, nutrient cycling, and pest control. The state of São Paulo represents only 3% of the Brazilian territory but holds 33% of its mammalian diversity. Most of its territory is dominated by agriculture, past...

The Dekeyser's nectar bat (Lonchophylla dekeyseri) is a cave roosting bat endemic to the Brazilian Cerrado that is considered endangered according to the IUCN Red List. Even though it is likely highly threatened, there is no current assessment of its conservation status or the conservation of the caves within its distribution. Additionally, a chang...

[...] Aiming to tie those loose ends and improve the communication between data producers and users, and by harnessing the framework created by the previously mentioned guidelines, we propose 10 simple rules for reporting information related to data collection methods, raw data, processed data, and model results from studies on species interactions...

Pathogen evolution is one of the least predictable components of disease emergence, particularly in nature. Here, building on principles established by the geographic mosaic theory of coevolution, we develop a quantitative, spatially-explicit framework for mapping the evolutionary risk of viral emergence. Driven by interest in diseases like SARS, M...

Global changes in response to human encroachment into natural habitats and carbon emissions are driving the biodiversity extinction crisis and increasing disease emergence risk. Host distributions are one critical component to identify areas at risk of viral spillover, and bats act as reservoirs of diverse viruses. We developed a reproducible ecolo...

Understanding biodiversity patterns as well as drivers of population declines, and range losses provides crucial baselines for monitoring and conservation. However, the information needed to evaluate such trends remains unstandardised and sparsely available for many taxonomic groups and habitats, including the cave-dwelling bats and cave ecosystems...

Data that catalogue viral diversity on Earth have been fragmented across sources, disciplines, formats, and various degrees of open sharing, posing challenges for research on macroecology, evolution, and public health. Here, we solve this problem by establishing a dynamically maintained database of vertebrate-virus associations, called The Global V...

Data papers and open databases have revolutionized contemporary science, as they provide the long‐needed incentive to collaborate in large international teams and make natural history information widely available. Nevertheless, most data papers focus on species occurrence or abundance, while interactions have received much less attention. To help f...

Global changes in response to human encroachment into natural habitats and carbon emissions are driving the biodiversity extinction crisis and increasing disease emergence risk. Host distributions are one critical component to identify areas at risk of spillover, and bats act as reservoirs of diverse viruses. We developed a reproducible ecological...

Cross-species transmission of pathogens is intimately linked to human and environmental health. With limited healthcare and challenging living conditions, people living in poverty may be particularly susceptible to endemic and emerging diseases. Similarly, wildlife is impacted by human influences, including pathogen sharing, especially for species...

Understanding biodiversity patterns as well as drivers of population declines, and range losses provides crucial baselines for monitoring and conservation. However, the information needed to evaluate such trends remains unstandardised and sparsely available for many taxonomic groups and habitats, including the cave-dwelling bats and cave ecosystems...

In the light of the urgency raised by the COVID-19 pandemic, global investment in wildlife virology is likely to increase, and new surveillance programmes will identify hundreds of novel viruses that might someday pose a threat to humans. To support the extensive task of laboratory characterization, scientists may increasingly rely on data-driven r...

en • Mammalian carnivores (order Carnivora) perform important regulatory functions in terrestrial food webs. Building a comprehensive knowledge of the dietary patterns of carnivorans and the factors determining such patterns is essential for improving our understanding of the role of carnivorans in ecosystem functioning. • In the Neotropics, there...

Landscape connectivity is important for a wide range of ecological processes, including to disease spread, once it describes the degree to which landscapes facilitate or impede vector and hosts dispersion. Understanding connectivity is extremely important to identify where pathogens can move, and at what speed, allowing the organization of vaccinat...

Data cataloguing viral diversity on Earth have been fragmented across sources, disciplines, formats, and various degrees of open collation, posing challenges for research on macroecology, evolution, and public health. Here, we solve this problem by establishing a dynamically-maintained database of vertebrate-virus associations, called The Global Vi...

Cross-species transmission of pathogens is intimately linked to human and environmental health. With limited healthcare and challenging living conditions, people living in poverty may be particularly susceptible to endemic and emerging diseases. Similarly, wildlife is impacted by human influences, including pathogen sharing, especially for species...

In light of the urgency raised by the COVID-19 pandemic, global investment in wildlife virology is likely to increase, and new surveillance programs will identify hundreds of novel viruses that might someday pose a threat to humans. Our capacity to identify which viruses are capable of zoonotic emergence depends on the existence of a technology—a m...

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...

In the past decades, bat ecology has developed considerably thanks to novel theoretical frameworks, as well as innovative tools for data collection and analysis. In this wind of change, network theory has become very useful to understand the complexity of the associations established by bats among themselves, with other organisms, and with their en...

Natural populations are not homogenous systems but sets of individuals that occupy subsets of the species’ niche. This phenomenon is known as individual specialization. Recently, several studies found evidence of individual specialization in animal diets. Diet is a critical dimension of a species’ niche that affects several other dimensions, includ...

In human-modified landscapes, where large bird and mammal species are often functionally extinct, bats are the main seed dispersers. However, the role of seed dispersal by bats for the maintenance of habitat dynamics in fragmented landscapes is still not understood, with information lacking on landscape-level effects of plant–bat interactions. We p...

Aim Forest fragmentation is among the principal causes of global biodiversity loss, yet how it affects mutualistic interactions between plants and animals at large spatial scale is poorly understood. In particular, tropical forest regeneration depends on animal‐mediated seed dispersal, but the seed‐dispersing animals face rapid decline due to fores...

How are ecological systems assembled? Identifying common structural patterns within complex networks of interacting species has been a major challenge in ecology, but researchers have focused primarily on single interaction types aggregating in space or time. Here, we shed light on the assembly rules of a multilayer network formed by frugivory and...

Background: Hantavirus disease in humans is rare but frequently lethal in the Neotropics. Several abundant and widely distributed Sigmodontinae rodents are the primary hosts of Orthohantavirus and, in combination with other factors, these rodents can shape hantavirus disease. Here, we assessed the influence of host diversity, climate, social vulne...

Cerrado is a biodiversity hotspot composed of a vegetation mosaic landscape ranging from grasslands to forests. It holds a high endemicity of plants and vertebrate species sufering from high habitat destruction rates. We aimed at characterizing the mutualistic interactions between bats and the plant species present in their diet in the diferent hab...

Several viruses from the genus Orthohantavirus are known to cause lethal disease in humans. Sigmodontinae rodents are the main hosts responsible for hantavirus transmission in the tropical forests, savannas, and wetlands of South America. These rodents can shed different hantaviruses, such as the lethal and emerging Araraquara orthohantavirus. Fact...

Species interactions can shape the structure of natural communities. Such sets of interactions have been described as complex ecological networks, an example of which is the commensal network formed by epiphyte–phorophyte interactions. Vascular epiphytes germinate and grow on phorophytes (support trees), assuming a horizontal distribution (among th...

Scientists have long been trying to understand why the Neotropical region holds the highest diversity of birds on Earth. Recently, there has been increased interest in morpho- logical variation between and within species, and in how climate, topography, and anthropogenic pressures may explain and affect phenotypic variation. Because morphological d...

Scientists have long been trying to understand why the Neotropical region holds the highest diversity of birds on Earth. Recently, there has been increased interest in morphological variation between and within species, and in how climate, topography and anthropogenic pressures may explain and affect phenotypic variation. Because morphological data...

After obtaining certification of the absence of transmission of the Trypanosoma cruzi by Triatoma infestans in 2006, other native species of protozoan vectors have been found in human dwellings within municipalities of the State of Paraná, Southern Brazil. However, the spatial distribution of T. cruzi vectors and how climatic and landscape combined...

Climate and landscape suitability of the 399 municipalities of the State of Paraná for the occurrence of triatomines. (DOCX)

Summary of the factorial analysis of the climatic variables used to model the distribution of triatomines in the State of Paraná, Southern Brazil. Bold values correspond to climatic variables used for the construction of climate-based models. (DOCX)

Summary of the factorial analysis of the landscape variables used to model the distribution of triatomines in the State of Paraná, Southern Brazil. Bold values correspond to landscape variables used for the construction of landscape models. (DOCX)

The True Skill Statistic (TSS) values of climate-based models and landscape-based models. We used the following algorithms: Bioclim, Gower, Maxent, and numbers from 1 to 10 are the model replicates. SD—Standard deviation. (DOCX)

How are ecological systems assembled? Here, we aim to contribute to answering this question by harnessing the framework of a novel integrative hypothesis. We shed light on the assembly rules of a multilayer network formed by frugivory and nectarivory interactions between bats and plants in the Neotropics. Our results suggest that, at a large scale,...

Resumo: A delimitação geográfica de um bioma engloba questões que envolvem fatores ambientais, como clima e características da vegetação, além de aspectos políticos. Consequentemente, variações na delimitação de um bioma são recorrentes. A Mata Atlântica é um dos mais importantes hotspots de biodiversidade do mundo e historicamente diversas delimit...

The geographic delimitation of a biome encompasses questions that involve environmental factors such as climate and vegetation characteristics as well as political aspects. Consequently, variation on biome delimitation is recurrent. The Atlantic Forest is one of the most important biodiversity hotspots in the world, and historically several territo...

Bats (Order: Chiroptera) harbor a high diversity of emerging pathogens presumably because their ability to fly and social behavior favor the maintenance, evolution, and dissemination of these pathogens. Until 2012, there was only one report of the presence of Hantavirus in bats. Historically, it was thought that these viruses were harbored primaril...

Here we compile a data set comprising morphological and life history information of 279 mammal species from 39,850 individuals of 388 populations ranging from 5.83 to 29.75 decimal degrees of latitude and 34.82 to 56.73 decimal degrees of lon- gitude in the Atlantic forest of South America. We present trait information from 16,840 individ- uals of...

Measures of traits are the basis of functional biological diversity. Numerous works consider mean species-level measures of traits while ignoring individual variance within species. However, there is a large amount of variation within species and it is increasingly apparent that it is important to consider trait variation not only between species,...

Open data, reproducibilidade e organização de dados

Bats are the second most diverse mammal order and they provide vital ecosystem functions (e.g., pollination, seed dispersal, and nutrient flux in caves) and services (e.g., crop pest suppression). Bats are also important vectors of infectious diseases, harboring more than 100 different virus types. In the present study, we compiled information on b...

South America holds 30% of the world's avifauna, with the Atlantic Forest representing one of the richest region of the Neotropics. Here we compiled a dataset on Brazilian Atlantic Forest bird occurrence (150,423) and abundance samples (N=832 bird species; 33,119) using multiple methods, including qualitative surveys, mist-nets, point counts, and l...

Our understanding of mammal ecology has always been hindered by the difficulties of observing species in closed tropical forests. Camera trapping has become a major advance for monitoring terrestrial mammals in biodiversity rich ecosystems. Here we compiled one of the largest datasets of inventories of terrestrial mammal communities for the Neotrop...

The substitution of natural ecosystems with agriculture has led to the establishment of human-modified landscapes globally. In some tropical regions, this process is decades-old, allowing for the study of the effect of such modifications on the remaining biodiversity. However, unlike forest fragments inside regions with extensive primary coverage,...