
Valério De Patta PillarFederal University of Rio Grande do Sul | UFRGS · Departamento de Ecologia
Valério De Patta Pillar
PhD
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371
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
March 1993 - present
Education
September 1988 - February 1992
March 1986 - July 1988
March 1977 - July 1981
Publications
Publications (371)
Over half of Earth’s land surface is covered with fire-prone vegetation , with grassy ecosystems—such as grasslands, savannas, woodlands, and shrublands—being the most extensive . In the context of the climate crisis, scientists worldwide are exploring adaptation measures to address the heightened fire risk driven by more frequent extreme climatic...
Plant communities are composed of species that differ both in functional traits and evolutionary histories. As species’ functional traits partly result from their individual evolutionary history, we expect the functional diversity of communities to increase with increasing phylogenetic diversity. This expectation has only been tested at local scale...
A perda de vegetação nativa ocasionada por mudanças no uso da terra reduz a riqueza em comunidades do solo. Entretanto, pode haver um lapso de tempo nas respostas das comunidades, postergando o efeito de perda de espécies (dívida de extinção). Nosso objetivo é avaliar se há diferença na proporção de vegetação nativa (PVN) em um período de dez anos,...
The catastrophic floods that affected southern Brazil last May should serve as a warning to human societies that, despite the still widespread climate change skepticism or denial , mitigation and adaptation to cope with the ongoing climate crisis are urgently needed. The toll was 213 people killed or missing; 2.4 million people affected , including...
As áreas de reserva legal (ARLs) são parte fundamental da estratégia
brasileira de conservação, juntamente com as áreas de preservação permanente.
As ARLs são destinadas à manutenção da biodiversidade e podem ser manejadas
de forma sustentável. Quando essas áreas abrigam ecossistemas dependentes
de fogo e pastejo, como os campos nativos e as savana...
Abstract-Legal reserve areas (LRAs) are a fundamental part of the Brazilian conservation strategy, together with permanent preservation areas. The LRAs are intended to maintain biodiversity and can be managed sustainably. When these areas are home to ecosystems that depend on fire and grazing, such as native grasslands and savannas, management prac...
The lack of synthesized information regarding biodiversity is a major problem among researchers, leading to a pervasive cycle where ecologists make field campaigns to collect information that already exists and yet has not been made available for a broader audience. This problem leads to long-lasting effects in public policies such as spending mone...
The lack of synthesized information regarding biodiversity is a major problem among researchers, leading to a pervasive cycle where ecologists make field campaigns to collect information that already exists and yet has not been made available for a broader audience. This problem leads to long-lasting effects in public policies such as spending mone...
Question
What conditions drive trait divergence during community assembly through environmental filtering, and why are some communities more trait‐diverse than others?
Methods
An individual‐based, stochastic, spatially explicit metacommunity simulation model produced data on species traits, spatially autocorrelated, nested, feedback‐generated envi...
Most species-rich communities consist of a limited number of common species and many rare species. This widespread ecological pattern can arise due to the predominance of either niche-based or neutral-based processes in community structuring. We tested two hypotheses related to this pattern for an anuran metacommunity composed of 35 species distrib...
Climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of short-term (~1 y) drought events—the most common duration of drought—globally. Yet the impact of this intensification of drought on ecosystem functioning remains poorly resolved. This is due in part to the widely disparate approaches ecologists have employed to study drought, variation in t...
Grasslands in the Campos Sulinos region are suffering rapid losses due to expansion of agricultural fields and exotic tree plantations, resulting in risks of losses of biodiversity and ecosystem services. In this chapter, we analyse the current contribution of the protected area to conservation of grasslands, discuss the role – and implementation p...
In many parts of southern Brazil, mosaics of grassland and forests are found, but little is known how this vegetation pattern has been formed. Are these mosaics partly natural or made by humans? Paleoecological information is needed for understanding the origin of these ecosystems. Data on development, dynamic and stability, their response to envir...
Brazil’s natural environments include a considerable cover of grasslands and savannas that have high and unique biodiversity. The South Brazilian grassland region (or Campos Sulinos, in portuguese) has received somewhat more attention in science over the past two decades, but remains neglected in conservation. This is especially true for the grassl...
Campos Sulinos grasslands have a long evolutionary history intertwined with fire and grazing: they are disturbance-dependent ecosystems. Disturbance, in this context, refers to events that remove plant biomass. In this chapter we explore the main types of disturbance, namely fire, grazing, and animal disturbance, and their influence on the vegetati...
A relação entre produção de alimentos e a preservação do meio ambiente tem se tornado um tema de debate internacional, principalmente relacionado a emissões de gases do efeito estufa. Desta forma, torna-se cada vez mais importante conhecer potenciais fontes e sumidouros destes gases, avaliando principalmente o balanço de Carbono em área de agricult...
We review the underlying principles of plant community assembly and build a conceptual model into which we map experiments and simulation approaches. In this model, environmental filtering selects individuals from a species pool based on non-independent traits bounded by trade-offs. The feedback of communities on environmental factors mimics plant-...
It is widely perceived how research institutes have been adopting the discourse of champions of diversity, inclusion, and equity (DEI) in recent years. Despite progress in diversity and inclusion in the academic environment, we highlight here that nothing or, at very best, little work has been done to overcome the scientific labor division in acade...
Aim
Theoretical, experimental and observational studies have shown that biodiversity–ecosystem functioning (BEF) relationships are influenced by functional community structure through two mutually non‐exclusive mechanisms: (1) the dominance effect (which relates to the traits of the dominant species); and (2) the niche partitioning effect [which re...
As Earth's climate has varied strongly through geological time, studying the impacts of past climate change on biodiversity helps to understand the risks from future climate change. However, it remains unclear how paleoclimate shapes spatial variation in biodiversity. Here, we assessed the influence of Quaternary climate change on spatial dissimila...
Questions
The adjustment of grazing pressure affects above‐ground biomass and its variation in space and time, which is a tool in grassland management for biodiversity conservation and livestock production. Here we ask to what extent the variation in above‐ground biomass at the scale of quadrats is predictive of (1) community‐weighted means (CWMs)...
Here we provide the ‘Global Spectrum of Plant Form and Function Dataset’, containing species mean values for six vascular plant traits. Together, these traits –plant height, stem specific density, leaf area, leaf mass per area, leaf nitrogen content per dry mass, and diaspore (seed or spore) mass – define the primary axes of variation in plant form...
Afforestation of subtropical grasslands increased during the last decade and their impacts on soil biota and functions are not well known. Here we investigated the effects of grassland afforestation with Eucalyptus on soil Collembola communities in southern Brazil. By using paired transects (native grassland vs. plantation), we assessed Collembola...
The effects of climate changes on the stability of plant communities is a major concern, especially for the maintenance of ecosystem processes and services. Biodiversity may buffer communities from the effects of these disturbances, providing resistance and resilience. Here we assess the interplay between biodiversity facets on resistance and resil...
The effects of climate changes on the stability of plant communities is a major concern, especially for the maintenance of ecosystem processes and services. Biodiversity may buffer communities from the effects of these disturbances, providing resistance and resilience. Here we assess the interplay between biodiversity facets on resistance and resil...
The effects of climate changes on the stability of plant communities is a major concern, especially for the maintenance of ecosystem processes and services. Biodiversity may buffer communities from the effects of these disturbances, providing resistance and resilience. Here we assess the interplay between biodiversity facets on resistance and resil...
Abstract. The Río de la Plata Grasslands (RPG) are one of the largest areas of open ecosystems (grasslands, shrublands and savannas) in the world. Historically, these systems have experienced, and continue to experience, an enormous loss of natural habitats. Moreover, their importance has been largely invisible in comparison to forested systems. Th...
Global patterns of regional (gamma) plant diversity are relatively well known, but whether these patterns hold for local communities, and the dependence on spatial grain, remain controversial. Using data on 170,272 georeferenced local plant assemblages, we created global maps of alpha diversity (local species richness) for vascular plants at three...
The erosion of functional diversity may foster the collapse of ecological systems. Functional diversity is ultimately determined by the distribution of species traits. As species traits are a legacy of species evolutionary history, one might expect that the mode of trait evolution influences community resistance under the loss of functional diversi...
Safeguarding Earth’s tree diversity is a conservation priority due to the importance of trees for biodiversity and ecosystem functions and services such as carbon sequestration. Here, we improve the foundation for effective conservation of global tree diversity by analyzing a recently developed database of tree species covering 46,752 species. We q...
It has been argued that the mechanisms structuring ecological communities may be more generalizable when based on traits than on species identities. If so, patterns in the assembly of community‐level traits along environmental gradients should be similar in different places in the world. Alternatively, geographical change in the species pool and re...
Due to massive energetic investments in woody support structures, trees are subject to unique physiological, mechanical, and ecological pressures not experienced by herbaceous plants. Despite a wealth of studies exploring trait relationships across the entire plant kingdom, the dominant traits underpinning these unique aspects of tree form and func...
The South Brazilian grasslands (Campos Sulinos) form the dominant vegetation in southern Brazil. They are species-rich ecosystems that occur under distinct geomorphological and climatic conditions but spatial variation of plant species diversity remains understudied. Here, we present a detailed description of plant communities across the region. Ou...
Question
Grazing is an important disturbance for maintenance of structure and functioning of the plant communities in grassy ecosystems. Functional characteristics of plants, which are responsible for their response to grazing, vary at inter‐ and intraspecific levels. Here, we assessed: (1) the extent of intraspecific trait variation when compared...
Plant functional traits can predict community assembly and ecosystem functioning and are thus widely used in global models of vegetation dynamics and land–climate feedbacks. Still, we lack a global understanding of how land and climate affect plant traits. A previous global analysis of six traits observed two main axes of variation: (1) size variat...
O Plano Nacional de Recuperação da Vegetação Nativa (Planaveg) fixa meta de recuperação de 300.000 hectares no bioma Pampa. Contudo, mesmo com a criação do PRA na Lei n⁰ 12.651/2012 e regulamentação de diretrizes nacionais no Decreto n⁰ 8.235/2014, até o momento o programa não foi iniciado no Estado do Rio Grande do Sul. Sabidamente este significat...
The links between vegetation and soil biota are responsible for a variety of ecosystem processes and services that can be affected by grazing. In this study, we aimed to evaluate the effects of grazing frequency in natural grasslands’ biodiversity (plant and collembola communities) and on ecosystem processes (decomposition and biomass accumulation)...
The Río de la Plata Grasslands (RPG) are one of the largest areas of open ecosystems (grasslands, shrublands and savannas) in the world. Historically these systems have experienced, and continue to experience, an enormous loss of natural habitats. Moreover, their importance has been largely invisible in comparison to forested systems. The remaining...
A bstract
Due to massive energetic investments in woody support structures, trees are subject to unique physiological, mechanical, and ecological pressures not experienced by herbaceous plants. When considering trait relationships across the entire plant kingdom, plant trait frameworks typically must omit traits unique to large woody species, there...
Motivation
Assessing biodiversity status and trends in plant communities is critical for understanding, quantifying and predicting the effects of global change on ecosystems. Vegetation plots record the occurrence or abundance of all plant species co‐occurring within delimited local areas. This allows species absences to be inferred, information se...
Questions
Grasslands in subtropical Brazil are still becoming known as potentially fire-prone ecosystems. Aiming to better understand fire effects on biodiversity, we addressed the following questions: Does fire benefit all alpha and beta components of taxonomic and functional diversity in grasslands? Which functional groups are affected? Does dive...
Progress in phylogenetic community ecology is often limited by the availability of phylogenetic information and the lack of appropriate methods and solutions to deal with this problem. We estimate the effect of the lack of phylogenetic information on the relations among taxa measured by commonly used phylogenetic metrics in comparative studies and...
Differently from commonly used forest conservation strategies, the absence of disturbance in non-forest-ecosystems can result in loss of biodiversity. Grassy ecosystems characterize extensive areas in all biomes in Brazil, offering great contribution to biological diversity and providing ecosystem services on which society depends. Palaeoecological...
Trait-based approaches offer complementary views to the classic taxonomic approach, which is a crucial step forward to unveil mechanisms of community assembly, species interactions, ecosystem functioning, and tackling important conservation issues. These approaches require an enormous sampling effort to provide complete trait datasets, consequently...
Fire is an important ecological and evolutionary factor affecting plant communities worldwide. After fire, plants can resprout or germinate and systems may differ according to their post-fire regeneration strategies. Therefore, the main aim of this study was to analyze the most important regeneration strategies in Brazilian subtropical grasslands....
The Program for Biodiversity Research (PPBio) is an innovative program designed to integrate all biodiversity research stakeholders. Operating since 2004, it has installed long-term ecological research sites throughout Brazil and its logic has been applied in some other southern-hemisphere countries. The program supports all aspects of research nec...
Conservation biology is designed to identify pressing environmental problems and to solve them. This review evaluates the relative effort of conservation biology in problem-based and solution-based research, and tests whether or not this has changed in the past decades for five major drivers of biodiversity loss, i.e. habitat loss and fragmentation...
Questions
Eragrostis plana is the most invasive species in grasslands of southern Brazil. We ask how it affects the functional structure of communities considering leaf traits related to forage palatability for grazers. As consensus is lacking about whether to include or omit the invasive species in the analysis, we propose a method for partitionin...
Question
In vegetation science, the compositional dissimilarity among two or more groups of plots is usually tested with dissimilarity‐based multivariate analysis of variance (db‐MANOVA), whereas the compositional characterization of the different groups is performed by means of indicator species analysis. Although db‐MANOVA and indicator species a...
Due to a production error this article was inadvertently released early. It has been temporarily removed until the embargo is lifted.
Due to a production error this article was inadvertently released early. It has been temporarily removed until the embargo is lifted.
The Program for Biodiversity Research (PPBio) is an innovative program designed to integrate all biodiversity research stakeholders. Operating since 2004, it has installed long-term ecological research sites throughout Brazil and its logic has been applied in some other southern-hemisphere countries. The program supports all aspects of research nec...
Aim
To identify functional traits that best predict community assembly without knowing the underlying environmental drivers.
Methods
We propose a new method based on the correlation r(XY) between two matrices of potential community composition: the matrix X is fuzzy‐weighted by trait similarities of species, and the matrix Y is derived by Beals sm...
Functional traits determine an organism's performance in a given environment and as such determine which organisms will be found where. Species respond to local conditions, but also to larger scale gradients, such as climate. Trait ecology links these responses of species to community composition and species distributions. Yet, we often do not know...
Both historical and contemporary environmental conditions determine present biodiversity patterns, but their relative importance is not well understood. One way to disentangle their relative effects is to assess how different dimensions of beta-diversity relate to past climatic changes, i.e., taxonomic, phylogenetic and functional compositional dis...
Functional traits determine an organism’s performance in a given environment and as such determine which organisms will be found where. Species respond to local conditions, but also to larger scale gradients, such as climate. Trait ecology links these responses of species to community composition and species distributions. Yet, we often do not know...
Biodiversity shortfalls are knowledge gaps that may result from uneven sampling through time and space and human interest biases. Gaps in data of functional traits of species may add uncertainty in functional diversity and structure measures and hinder inference on ecosystem functioning and ecosystem services, with negative implications for conserv...
It has been increasingly argued that ecological restoration should focus more on targeting ecosystem services than on species composition of reference ecosystems. In this sense, the role that species play on community assembly and functioning through their functional traits is very relevant, because effect traits mediate ecosystem processes, ultima...
Com o propósito de contribuir para a ação judicial movida pelo Ministério Público Estadual (Ação Civil Pública n. 9065931-65.2019.8.21.0001), que tramita perante a 10ª Vara da Fazenda Pública da comarca de Porto Alegre/RS, contra o Estado do Rio Grande do Sul e a FEPAM, o presente parecer que analisa os possíveis riscos ambientais e outras questões...
Aim To identify functional traits that best predict community assembly without knowing the driving environmental factors.
Methods We propose a new method that is based on the correlation r(XY) between two matrices of potential community composition: matrix X is fuzzy-weighted by trait similarities of species, and matrix Y is derived by Beals smoot...
Trees are of vital importance for ecosystem functioning and services at local to global scales, yet we still lack a detailed overview of the global patterns of tree diversity and the underlying drivers, particularly the imprint of paleoclimate. Here, we present the high-resolution (110 km) worldwide mapping of tree species richness, functional and...