Photo: R. Solar
Assessing the spatial distribution of ecological studies on Amazonian fauna
Raquel L. Carvalho, Cássio Alencar Nunes, Joice Ferreira, Eduardo Venticinque, Fernanda Alves-Martins, Ludson Ázara, Fabricio Baccaro, Jos Barlow, Erika Berenguer, Fernando Elias, Cecília Gontijo-Leal, Alexander Lees, Angelica Resende, Fernando Schmidt, Fernando Vaz-de-Mello, Filipe França
Spatial distribution of ecological research can vary among terrestrial taxa, mainly in large developing countries with restricted research funding, limited access to remote areas and uneven distribution of research institutions and universities. In this study, we investigated the spatial distribution of ecological studies for bird, dung beetle and ant communities in the Brazilian Amazon.
We assessed peer-reviewed papers published between 1970 to July 2020 in the Web of Science platform. We found a total of 2,244 studies when searching the following set of keywords separately: Bird and Amazon*, Dung beetles and Amazon*, Ants and Amazon*. However, many publications were removed from our assessment after verifying that they did not fit the following criteria: i) ecological studies, with ii) standardized sampling and iii) that occurred within the limits of the Brazilian Amazon. Therefore, our final assessment included 105, 67 and 84 studies about bird, dung beetle and ant communities, respectively. Since the integrated planning of terrestrial and aquatic has co-benefits for both terrestrial and aquatic fauna, we used a river basin framework to divide the Brazilian Amazon in 26 hydrological basins and investigated in which basins the ecological studies of terrestrial fauna occurred the most.
We found that most ecological research on bird, dung beetle and ant communities are concentrated in a few hydrological basins, mainly in the central and eastern Amazon. Although these are still preliminary results, we highlight the need for further ecological research in the southeastern and eastern Amazon. The uneven and restricted spatial distribution of faunal studies in the Amazon limits our ability to understand the full extent of anthropogenic impacts, as well as to inform and guide conservation strategies to mitigate their impacts in one of Earth’s most biodiverse ecosystems.
Why birds, ants and dung beetles?
Birds, ants and dung beetles are considered bioindicators. That means that we can have a clue about the health of the whole environment by looking at their communities. They respond quickly to environmental change and perform important ecological functions, for example: pollination, seed dispersal and dung removal.
Photos: A. Lees, T. F. Santos, H. Griffiths
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