ORCID Profile
0000-0001-5526-8109
Current Organisation
Universidade de São Paulo
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Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 03-2004
DOI: 10.1038/NATURE02383
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 06-2005
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 24-10-2022
DOI: 10.1111/GEB.13596
Abstract: To investigate the geographic patterns and ecological correlates in the geographic distribution of the most common tree dispersal modes in Amazonia (endozoochory, synzoochory, anemochory and hydrochory). We examined if the proportional abundance of these dispersal modes could be explained by the availability of dispersal agents (disperser‐availability hypothesis) and/or the availability of resources for constructing zoochorous fruits (resource‐availability hypothesis). Tree‐inventory plots established between 1934 and 2019. Trees with a diameter at breast height (DBH) ≥ 9.55 cm. Amazonia, here defined as the lowland rain forests of the Amazon River basin and the Guiana Shield. We assigned dispersal modes to a total of 5433 species and morphospecies within 1877 tree‐inventory plots across terra‐firme, seasonally flooded, and permanently flooded forests. We investigated geographic patterns in the proportional abundance of dispersal modes. We performed an abundance‐weighted mean pairwise distance (MPD) test and fit generalized linear models (GLMs) to explain the geographic distribution of dispersal modes. Anemochory was significantly, positively associated with mean annual wind speed, and hydrochory was significantly higher in flooded forests. Dispersal modes did not consistently show significant associations with the availability of resources for constructing zoochorous fruits. A lower dissimilarity in dispersal modes, resulting from a higher dominance of endozoochory, occurred in terra‐firme forests (excluding podzols) compared to flooded forests. The disperser‐availability hypothesis was well supported for abiotic dispersal modes (anemochory and hydrochory). The availability of resources for constructing zoochorous fruits seems an unlikely explanation for the distribution of dispersal modes in Amazonia. The association between frugivores and the proportional abundance of zoochory requires further research, as tree recruitment not only depends on dispersal vectors but also on conditions that favour or limit seedling recruitment across forest types.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 2021
Publisher: American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Date: 03-03-2017
Abstract: The extent to which pre-Columbian societies altered Amazonian landscapes is hotly debated. We performed a basin-wide analysis of pre-Columbian impacts on Amazonian forests by overlaying known archaeological sites in Amazonia with the distributions and abundances of 85 woody species domesticated by pre-Columbian peoples. Domesticated species are five times more likely than nondomesticated species to be hyperdominant. Across the basin, the relative abundance and richness of domesticated species increase in forests on and around archaeological sites. In southwestern and eastern Amazonia, distance to archaeological sites strongly influences the relative abundance and richness of domesticated species. Our analyses indicate that modern tree communities in Amazonia are structured to an important extent by a long history of plant domestication by Amazonian peoples.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 25-05-2021
DOI: 10.1038/S41467-021-23236-3
Abstract: Arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) and ectomycorrhizal (EcM) associations are critical for host-tree performance. However, how mycorrhizal associations correlate with the latitudinal tree beta- ersity remains untested. Using a global dataset of 45 forest plots representing 2,804,270 trees across 3840 species, we test how AM and EcM trees contribute to total beta- ersity and its components (turnover and nestedness) of all trees. We find AM rather than EcM trees predominantly contribute to decreasing total beta- ersity and turnover and increasing nestedness with increasing latitude, probably because wide distributions of EcM trees do not generate strong compositional differences among localities. Environmental variables, especially temperature and precipitation, are strongly correlated with beta- ersity patterns for both AM trees and all trees rather than EcM trees. Results support our hypotheses that latitudinal beta- ersity patterns and environmental effects on these patterns are highly dependent on mycorrhizal types. Our findings highlight the importance of AM-dominated forests for conserving global forest bio ersity.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 08-05-2018
DOI: 10.1111/GEB.12747
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 23-06-2020
DOI: 10.1038/S41598-020-66686-3
Abstract: Amazonian forests are extraordinarily erse, but the estimated species richness is very much debated. Here, we apply an ensemble of parametric estimators and a novel technique that includes conspecific spatial aggregation to an extended database of forest plots with up-to-date taxonomy. We show that the species abundance distribution of Amazonia is best approximated by a logseries with aggregated in iduals, where aggregation increases with rarity. By averaging several methods to estimate total richness, we confirm that over 15,000 tree species are expected to occur in Amazonia. We also show that using ten times the number of plots would result in an increase to just ~50% of those 15,000 estimated species. To get a more complete s le of all tree species, rigorous field c aigns may be needed but the number of trees in Amazonia will remain an estimate for years to come.
Publisher: American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Date: 18-10-2013
Abstract: Recent decades have seen a major international effort to inventory tree communities in the Amazon Basin and Guiana Shield (Amazonia), but the vast extent and record ersity of these forests have h ered an understanding of basinwide patterns. To overcome this obstacle, we compiled and standardized species-level data on more than half a million trees in 1170 plots s ling all major lowland forest types to explore patterns of commonness, rarity, and richness. The ~6-million-km 2 Amazonian lowlands were ided into 1° cells, and mean tree density was estimated for each cell by using a loess regression model that included no environmental data but had its basis exclusively in the geographic location of tree plots. A similar model, allied with a bootstrapping exercise to quantify s ling error, was used to generate estimated Amazon-wide abundances of the 4962 valid species in the data set. We estimated the total number of tree species in the Amazon by fitting the mean rank-abundance data to Fisher’s log-series distribution. Our analyses suggest that lowland Amazonia harbors 3.9 × 10 11 trees and ~16,000 tree species. We found 227 “hyperdominant” species (1.4% of the total) to be so common that together they account for half of all trees in Amazonia, whereas the rarest 11,000 species account for just 0.12% of trees. Most hyperdominants are habitat specialists that have large geographic ranges but are only dominant in one or two regions of the basin, and a median of 41% of trees in in idual plots belong to hyperdominants. A disproportionate number of hyperdominants are palms, Myristicaceae, and Lecythidaceae. The finding that Amazonia is dominated by just 227 tree species implies that most biogeochemical cycling in the world’s largest tropical forest is performed by a tiny sliver of its ersity. The causes underlying hyperdominance in these species remain unknown. Both competitive superiority and widespread pre-1492 cultivation by humans are compelling hypotheses that deserve testing. Although the data suggest that spatial models can effectively forecast tree community composition and structure of unstudied sites in Amazonia, incorporating environmental data may yield substantial improvements. An appreciation of how thoroughly common species dominate the basin has the potential to simplify research in Amazonian biogeochemistry, ecology, and vegetation mapping. Such advances are urgently needed in light of the ,000 rare, poorly known, and potentially threatened tree species in the Amazon.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 17-01-2018
DOI: 10.1038/S41598-017-18927-1
Abstract: Species distribution models (SDMs) are widely used in ecology and conservation. Presence-only SDMs such as MaxEnt frequently use natural history collections (NHCs) as occurrence data, given their huge numbers and accessibility. NHCs are often spatially biased which may generate inaccuracies in SDMs. Here, we test how the distribution of NHCs and MaxEnt predictions relates to a spatial abundance model, based on a large plot dataset for Amazonian tree species, using inverse distance weighting (IDW). We also propose a new pipeline to deal with inconsistencies in NHCs and to limit the area of occupancy of the species. We found a significant but weak positive relationship between the distribution of NHCs and IDW for 66% of the species. The relationship between SDMs and IDW was also significant but weakly positive for 95% of the species, and sensitivity for both analyses was high. Furthermore, the pipeline removed half of the NHCs records. Presence-only SDM applications should consider this limitation, especially for large bio ersity assessments projects, when they are automatically generated without subsequent checking. Our pipeline provides a conservative estimate of a species’ area of occupancy, within an area slightly larger than its extent of occurrence, compatible to e.g. IUCN red list assessments.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 02-2016
DOI: 10.1038/NATURE16512
Abstract: Land-use change occurs nowhere more rapidly than in the tropics, where the imbalance between deforestation and forest regrowth has large consequences for the global carbon cycle. However, considerable uncertainty remains about the rate of biomass recovery in secondary forests, and how these rates are influenced by climate, landscape, and prior land use. Here we analyse aboveground biomass recovery during secondary succession in 45 forest sites and about 1,500 forest plots covering the major environmental gradients in the Neotropics. The studied secondary forests are highly productive and resilient. Aboveground biomass recovery after 20 years was on average 122 megagrams per hectare (Mg ha(-1)), corresponding to a net carbon uptake of 3.05 Mg C ha(-1) yr(-1), 11 times the uptake rate of old-growth forests. Aboveground biomass stocks took a median time of 66 years to recover to 90% of old-growth values. Aboveground biomass recovery after 20 years varied 11.3-fold (from 20 to 225 Mg ha(-1)) across sites, and this recovery increased with water availability (higher local rainfall and lower climatic water deficit). We present a biomass recovery map of Latin America, which illustrates geographical and climatic variation in carbon sequestration potential during forest regrowth. The map will support policies to minimize forest loss in areas where biomass resilience is naturally low (such as seasonally dry forest regions) and promote forest regeneration and restoration in humid tropical lowland areas with high biomass resilience.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 30-05-2019
Publisher: American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Date: 03-2019
Abstract: Tropical secondary forests recover quickly (decades) in tree species richness but slowly (centuries) in species composition.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 17-02-2023
DOI: 10.1038/S41598-023-28132-Y
Abstract: In a time of rapid global change, the question of what determines patterns in species abundance distribution remains a priority for understanding the complex dynamics of ecosystems. The constrained maximization of information entropy provides a framework for the understanding of such complex systems dynamics by a quantitative analysis of important constraints via predictions using least biased probability distributions. We apply it to over two thousand hectares of Amazonian tree inventories across seven forest types and thirteen functional traits, representing major global axes of plant strategies. Results show that constraints formed by regional relative abundances of genera explain eight times more of local relative abundances than constraints based on directional selection for specific functional traits, although the latter does show clear signals of environmental dependency. These results provide a quantitative insight by inference from large-scale data using cross-disciplinary methods, furthering our understanding of ecological dynamics.
Publisher: Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Date: 27-02-2017
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 13-09-2022
DOI: 10.1111/ECOG.06125
Abstract: Tree ersity and composition in Amazonia are known to be strongly determined by the water supplied by precipitation. Nevertheless, within the same climatic regime, water availability is modulated by local topography and soil characteristics (hereafter referred to as local hydrological conditions), varying from saturated and poorly drained to well‐drained and potentially dry areas. While these conditions may be expected to influence species distribution, the impacts of local hydrological conditions on tree ersity and composition remain poorly understood at the whole Amazon basin scale. Using a dataset of 443 1‐ha non‐flooded forest plots distributed across the basin, we investigate how local hydrological conditions influence 1) tree alpha ersity, 2) the community‐weighted wood density mean (CWM‐wd) – a proxy for hydraulic resistance and 3) tree species composition. We find that the effect of local hydrological conditions on tree ersity depends on climate, being more evident in wetter forests, where ersity increases towards locations with well‐drained soils. CWM‐wd increased towards better drained soils in Southern and Western Amazonia. Tree species composition changed along local soil hydrological gradients in Central‐Eastern, Western and Southern Amazonia, and those changes were correlated with changes in the mean wood density of plots. Our results suggest that local hydrological gradients filter species, influencing the ersity and composition of Amazonian forests. Overall, this study shows that the effect of local hydrological conditions is pervasive, extending over wide Amazonian regions, and reinforces the importance of accounting for local topography and hydrology to better understand the likely response and resilience of forests to increased frequency of extreme climate events and rising temperatures.
No related grants have been discovered for Alexandre Oliveira.