Luara Tourinho

Climate and land‐use changes are expected to negatively affect many species and ecological processes, leading to biodiversity loss. However, some species can adapt to these changes. Wide‐ranging species are expected to be less impacted by such changes, but they can occur in different domains with contrasting environmental conditions, resulting in different conservation statuses along their range. To understand whether a species will overall benefit or lose with global change, we evaluated the responses of a wide‐ranging but a vulnerable bird (Crax fasciolata) to separate and combined effects of climate and land‐use changes under different environmental policies in Brazil. Using ecological niche modeling and a land‐use model within the Brazilian political context, we quantified climatic, habitat, and environmental suitability for Crax fasciolata under historical (2000) and future (2050) scenarios. Our findings showed that environmental suitability can increase for Crax fasciolata in Brazil in future, but these effects vary according to the domain and the specific future scenario considered. Climatically suitable areas will increase in all scenarios, and those environmental scenarios that include better habitat conditions will provide more environmentally suitable areas for Crax fasciolata. However, this increase comes from newly suitable areas in the Atlantic Forest and the Amazon, while the Pantanal, the Caatinga, and the Cerrado will lose environmental suitability due to native vegetation loss. Despite the availability of these new areas, reduced landscape permeability may hinder Crax fasciolata from reaching them. This reinforces the urgent call for public policies for native vegetation protection, reforestation, and effective deforestation control.Abstract in Portuguese is available with online material

Ongoing climate change has caused well‐documented displacements of species' geographic distribution to newly climatically suitable areas. Ecological niche models (ENM) are widely used to project such climate‐induced changes but typically ignore species' interspecific interactions that might facilitate or prevent its establishment in new areas. Here, we projected the change in the distribution of Juçara Palm (Euterpe edulis Mart., Arecaceae), a neotropical threatened palm, taking into consideration its ecological interactions. We run ENMs of E. edulis, plus its known seed dispersers (15 bird species) and predators (19 birds and mammals) under current and future climatic conditions. Additionally, for E. edulis, we removed deforested areas from the model. When considering only climate, climate change has a positive impact on E. edulis, with a predicted westward expansion and a modest southward contraction, with a 26% net gain in distribution by 2060. When removing deforested ar...

Most conservation decisions take place at national or finer spatial scales. Providing useful information at such decision-making scales is essential for guiding the practice of conservation. Brazil is one of the world’s megadiverse countries, and consequently decisions about conservation in the country have a disproportionate impact on the survival of global biodiversity. For three groups of terrestrial vertebrates (birds, mammals, and amphibians), we examined geographic patterns of diversity and protection in Brazil, including that of endemic, small-ranged, and threatened species. To understand potential limitations of the data, we also explored how spatial bias in collection localities may influence the perceived patterns of diversity. The highest overall species richness is in the Amazon and Atlantic Forests, while the Atlantic Forest dominates in terms of country endemics and small-ranged species. Globally threatened species do not present a consistent pattern. Patterns for birds were similar to overall species richness, with higher concentrations of threatened species in the Atlantic Forest, while mammals show a more generalized pattern across the country and a high concentration in the Amazon. Few amphibians are listed as threatened, mostly in the Atlantic Forest. Data deficient mammals occur across the country, concentrating in the Amazon and southeast Atlantic Forest, and there are no data deficient birds in Brazil. In contrast, nearly a third of amphibians are data deficient, widespread across the country, but with a high concentration in the far southeast. Spatial biases in species locality data, however, possibly influence the perceived patterns of biodiversity. Regions with low sampling density need more biological studies, as do the many data deficient species. All biomes except the Amazon have less than 3% of their area under full protection. Reassuringly though, rates of protection do correlate with higher biodiversity, including higher levels of threatened and small-ranged species. Our results indicate a need for expanded formal protection in Brazil, especially in the Atlantic forest, and with an emphasis on fully protected areas.

Ecophysiological models are more data demanding and, consequently, less used than correlative ecological niche models to predict species’ distribution under climate change, especially for endotherms. Hybrid models that integrate both approaches are even less used, and several aspects about their predictions (e.g. accuracy, geographic extent and uncertainty) have been poorly explored. We developed a hybrid model for mammals using hours of activity and hours of heat stress as mechanistic variables, fitted using macroclimatic data and applied to conventional correlative modeling. We then compared the outputs from conventional correlative models with our hybrid model for 58 tropical mammals in term of accuracy, uncertainty, and predicted geographic distribution under climate change. We expected that hybrid models to have higher accuracy than correlative ones, with difference in predicted geographic distribution extent. We found no substantial differences between correlative and hybrid p...