Island biodiversity in peril: Anticipating a loss of mammals' functional diversity with future species extinctions.

Islands are biodiversity hotspots that host unique assemblages. However, a substantial proportion of island species are threatened and their long-term survival is uncertain. Identifying and preserving vulnerable species has become a priority, but it is also essential to combine this information with other facets of biodiversity like functional diversity, to understand how future extinctions might affect ecosystem stability and functioning. Focusing on mammals, we (i) assessed how much functional space would be lost if threatened species go extinct, (ii) determined the minimum number of extinctions that would cause a significant functional loss, (iii) identified the characteristics (e.g., biotic, climatic, geographic, or orographic) of the islands most vulnerable to future changes in the functional space, and (iv) quantified how much of that potential functional loss would be offset by introduced species. Using trait information for 1474 mammal species occurring in 318 islands worldwide, we built trait probability density functions to quantify changes in functional richness and functional redundancy in each island if the mammals categorized by IUCN as threatened disappeared. We found that the extinction of threatened mammals would reduce the functional space in 63% of the assessed islands, although these extinctions in general would cause a reduction of less than 15% of their overall functional space. Also, on most islands, the extinction of just a few species would be sufficient to cause a significant loss of functional diversity. The potential functional loss would be higher on small, isolated, and/or species-rich islands, and, in general, the functional space lost would not be offset by introduced species. Our results show that the preservation of native species and their ecological roles remains crucial for maintaining the current functioning of island ecosystems. Therefore, conservation measures considering functional diversity are imperative to safeguard the unique functional roles of threatened mammal species on islands.

Harnessing online digital data in biodiversity monitoring.

Online digital data from media platforms have the potential to complement biodiversity monitoring efforts. We propose a strategy for integrating these data into current biodiversity datasets in light of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.

Using social media records to inform conservation planning.

Citizen science plays a crucial role in helping monitor biodiversity and inform conservation. With the widespread use of smartphones, many people share biodiversity information on social media, but this information is still not widely used in conservation. Focusing on Bangladesh, a tropical megadiverse and mega-populated country, we examined the importance of social media records in conservation decision-making. We collated species distribution records for birds and butterflies from Facebook and Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), grouped them into GBIF-only and combined GBIF and Facebook data, and investigated the differences in identifying critical conservation areas. Adding Facebook data to GBIF data improved the accuracy of systematic conservation planning assessments by identifying additional important conservation areas in the northwest, southeast, and central parts of Bangladesh, extending priority conservation areas by 4,000-10,000 km2 . Community efforts are needed to drive the implementation of the ambitious Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework targets, especially in megadiverse tropical countries with a lack of reliable and up-to-date species distribution data. We highlight that conservation planning can be enhanced by including available data gathered from social media platforms.

Registros de las redes sociales para guiar la planeación de la conservación Resumen La ciencia ciudadana es importante para monitorear la biodiversidad e informar la conservación. Con el creciente uso de los teléfonos inteligentes, muchas personas comparten información de la biodiversidad en redes sociales, pero todavía no se usa ampliamente en la conservación. Analizamos la importancia de los registros de las redes sociales para las decisiones de conservación enfocados en Bangladesh, un país tropical megadiverso y mega poblado. Cotejamos los registros de distribución de especies de aves y mariposas en Facebook y Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), las agrupamos en datos sólo de GBIF o datos combinados de Facebook y GBIF e investigamos las diferencias en la identificación de las áreas de conservación críticas. La combinación de los datos de Facebook con los de GBIF mejoró la precisión de las evaluaciones de la planeación de la conservación sistemática al identificar otras áreas importantes de conservación en el noroeste, sureste y centro de Bangladesh, extendiendo así las áreas prioritarias de conservación en unos 4,000-10,000 km2 . Se requieren esfuerzos comunitarios para impulsar la implementación de los objetivos ambiciosos del Marco Global de Biodiversidad Kunming-Montreal, especialmente en países tropicales que carecen de datos confiables y actuales sobre la distribución de las especies. Destacamos que la planeación de la conservación puede mejorarse si se incluye información tomada de las redes sociales.

Assessing Brazilian protected areas through social media: Insights from 10 years of public interest and engagement.

Social media platforms are a valuable source of data for investigating cultural and political trends related to public interest in nature and conservation. Here, we use the micro-blogging social network Twitter to explore trends in public interest in Brazilian protected areas (PAs). We identified ~400,000 Portuguese language tweets pertaining to all categories of Brazilian PAs over a ten-year period (1 January 2011-31 December 2020). We analysed the content of these tweets and calculated metrics of user engagement (likes and retweets) to uncover patterns and drivers of public interest in Brazilian PAs. Our results indicate that users / tweets mentioning PAs remained stable throughout the sample period. However, engagement with tweets grew steeply, particularly from 2018 onward and coinciding with a change in the Brazilian federal government. Furthermore, public interest was not evenly distributed across PAs; while national parks were the subject of the most tweets, mainly related to tourism activities, tweets related to conflicts among park users and managers were more likely to engage Twitter users. Our study highlights that automatic or semi-automatic monitoring of social media content and engagement has great potential as an early warning system to identify emerging conflicts and to generate data and metrics to support PA policy, governance and management.

Public awareness and engagement in relation to the coastal oil spill in northeast Brazil.

Social media data is a rich source of information to assess human activities in catastrophic events. Here, we use social media data to understand how the 2019 Brazilian oil spill influenced social attitudes. Data were collected from the globally popular Instagram platform between August 1, 2019 and March 1, 2020. First, we manually identified the 5 most popular (portuguese language) hashtags related to the oil spill #oleonononordeste; #desastreambiental; #marsemoleo; #sosnordeste; #marsempetroleo. In the sequence, we collected information on captions, post metadata and users associated with posts retrieved using the selected hashtags. We identified a total of 7,413 posts. These posts were grouped in topics: government (47.76%), protest (24.37%), volunteers (24.45%), biodiversity (0.003%), origin (0.006%), tourism (0.008%) and others (0.016%). All topics had the peak of posts in October and November 2019. Nevertheless, interest in the oil spill was temporary, with most posts appearing in the 2-4 months after the beginning of the disaster. Our findings illustrate the enormous potential of using social media data for understanding and monitoring human engagement with environmental disasters, but also suggest that conservationists and environmental groups may only have a limited 'window of opportunity' to engage and mobilize public support for remediation and restoration efforts.

Societal extinction of species.

The ongoing global biodiversity crisis not only involves biological extinctions, but also the loss of experience and the gradual fading of cultural knowledge and collective memory of species. We refer to this phenomenon as 'societal extinction of species' and apply it to both extinct and extant taxa. We describe the underlying concepts as well as the mechanisms and factors that affect this process, discuss its main implications, and identify mitigation measures. Societal extinction is cognitively intractable, but it is tied to biological extinction and thus has important consequences for conservation policy and management. It affects societal perceptions of the severity of anthropogenic impacts and of true extinction rates, erodes societal support for conservation efforts, and causes the loss of cultural heritage.

Sustainable-use protected areas catalyze enhanced livelihoods in rural Amazonia.

Finding new pathways for reconciling socioeconomic well-being and nature sustainability is critically important for contemporary societies, especially in tropical developing countries where sustaining local livelihoods often clashes with biodiversity conservation. Many projects aimed at reconciling the goals of biodiversity conservation and social aspirations within protected areas (PAs) have failed on one or both counts. Here, we investigate the social consequences of living either inside or outside sustainable-use PAs in the Brazilian Amazon, using data from more than 100 local communities along a 2,000-km section of a major Amazonian river. The PAs in this region are now widely viewed as conservation triumphs, having implemented community comanagement of fisheries and recovery of overexploited wildlife populations. We document clear differences in social welfare in communities inside and outside PAs. Specifically, communities inside PAs enjoy better access to health care, education, electricity, basic sanitation, and communication infrastructure. Moreover, living within a PA was the strongest predictor of household wealth, followed by cash-transfer programs and the number of people per household. These collective cobenefits clearly influence life satisfaction, with only 5% of all adult residents inside PAs aspiring to move to urban centers, compared with 58% of adults in unprotected areas. Our results clearly demonstrate that large-scale "win-win" conservation solutions are possible in tropical countries with limited financial and human resources and reinforce the need to genuinely empower local people in integrated conservation-development programs.

Spondias mombin as a reservoir of fruit fly parasitoid populations in the Eastern Amazon: an undervalued ecosystem service.

Fruit flies are economically important pests that infest a wide variety of host trees. The environmental damage caused by traditional pesticide-based control methods has prompted scientists to seek less damaging alternatives such as biological control by native species. Parasitoids, especially Braconidae species, have excellent potential as biological control agents for fruit flies, being both generalists and well distributed geographically. Native fruit trees that support medium or high levels of these parasitoids could therefore play an important role in biological control strategies. A good potential example is Spondias mombin L. in the Brazilian Amazon, which hosts several species of fruit flies and associated parasitoids. Here, we provide a unique synthesis of over nearly two decades of data from the east Amazon, clearly demonstrating the potential of S. mombin to act as a source and reservoir of fruit fly parasitoids. This important ecosystem service (biological control) provided by the parasitoids and supported by S. mombin could be further enhanced through conservation of this plant species in its natural environment.

Uncovering assets in Brazilian national parks.

Protected areas (PAs) are the cornerstone of global conservation policy and have expanded dramatically over the last century. Though unequivocally beneficial for biodiversity, gazetting land for protecting nature can also be seen as an 'opportunity cost' that some politicians are unwilling to pay. One of the most effective strategies to increase the political resilience of PAs in the face of such threats is to demonstrate their broader value to society. This is one of the objectives of the recently proposed 'PA asset framework'. The framework conceptualizes PAs as being composed of suites of biophysical, human, infrastructure, institutional and cultural assets that interact with individuals and institutions to generate different forms of tangible and intangible value. Here, we test the utility of the framework by conducting an asset-based analysis of Brazilian National Parks (NPs) at two different scales (NP system and NP unit). Assets were identified at the system level through a systematic review of 49 Management Plans (MPs) using a typology of PA asset classes as a tool for characterising the presence and state of assets in or associated with NPs. At the NP unit level, assets were identified through semi-structured interviews with local managers of the Chapada Diamantina National Park. Biophysical and infrastructure assets were the most represented asset classes at both scales. Our analysis successfully revealed: (i) which assets can be managed to generate wider forms of values at local scale (e.g. natural spectacles, iconic species, park volunteers) (ii) relational values between assets (e.g. trails and outdoor recreational features), and (iii) value generating practices (VGPs) to capture values from the interaction between different assets (i.e. restoration of degraded areas through voluntary programmes, etc.). We conclude by discussing how the PA asset framework can be operatively integrated into NP management to improve the future allocation of limited financial resources.

Immediate social and economic impacts of a major oil spill on Brazilian coastal fishing communities.

In August 2019, a major oil spill hit nine Brazilian coastal states, affecting marine ecosystems and fishing communities. In this study, we assess the immediate social and economic impacts of this oil spill on fishing communities of the northeast coast. We conducted semi-structured interviews and focal meetings with 381 fishers and shellfish gatherers to understand the perceived socioeconomic impacts on different types of fishing. We also obtained information on fish consumption after the oil spill, which we compared with data prior to the oil spill from the same communities. Sales decreased by more than 50% for all types of fishing, strongly impacting local income generation. These communities, which are already social-ecologically vulnerable, have had their subsistence, food security and cultural maintenance strongly compromised. We argue that there is a clear need for coordinated state interventions to mitigation the impacts, considering it's environmental, social, economic, human health and political dimensions.

Quantifying anthropogenic threats affecting Marine Protected Areas in developing countries.

Conservation's capacity to deal with anthropogenic environmental threats within Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) varies enormously, especially in developing countries that are often immersed in weak enforcement, ineffective management and shortages of resources. A deeper understanding of the causes of these threats is fundamental for identifying effective management solutions. Here, we investigate the presumptive drivers of environmental threats across 40 Brazilian MPAs. We categorized and quantified environmental threats from two independent sources: i) the results of systematic social surveys carried out as part of WWF's RAPPAM assessment, as primary data source, and; ii) data gathered from news media articles related to the MPAs (secondary data source). We identified 461 reports of threats that we classified into three general categories: overexploitation, urbanization and land use threats. The presence of overexploitation threats was strongly associated with extreme poverty of local communities close to the MPAs. Threats also seem to be more frequent in category V MPAs, which in Brazil are Environmental Protection Areas (EPA), with multiple use objectives. Threats were concentrated on the North and Southeast coasts of Brazil. We found that data from news media can be used for qualitative assessment of threats, but has limited potential for quantification. Our findings highlight the need for policy makers and MPA managers to adopt a broader perspective that considers the role of social inequalities in promoting and exacerbating environmental threats. While recognizing that conservation has limited capacity to address the widespread social inequalities found in many tropical developing countries, if the socioeconomic context of local communities is significantly compromising conservation efforts it may be necessary to target and prioritize social interventions as a prerequisite for effective MPA management and governance.

Known unknowns: Filling the gaps in scientific knowledge production in the Caatinga.

The Caatinga is an ecologically unique semi-arid region of northeast Brazil characterized by high levels of endemism and severe anthropogenic threats from agricultural development and climate change. It is also one of the least known biomes in Brazil due to a combination of inadequate investment, low regional research capacity and difficult working conditions. However, while the lack of scientific knowledge of the Caatinga is well known, the spatial and temporal distribution of knowledge production has not been investigated. This is important because such biases undermine the development of effective conservation policy and practice and increase the uncertainty associated with conservation actions. Here, we map the geography of conservation knowledge production in the Caatinga and use an innovative hurdle model to identify the presumptive factors driving these patterns. Our analysis revealed strong geographic patterns, with research sites concentrated in the east of the region and in areas close to roads and research centres. There was also a positive association between conservation knowledge production and risk of desertification, indicating that conservation scientists are responding to conservation challenges faced by Caatinga's fauna and flora arising from climate change. Our results also highlight the pivotal role of pioneer scientists (those who develop research sites in previously unstudied/understudied areas) in determining the future geographic patterns of knowledge production. We conclude our article with a brief discussion of potential policies for increasing the spatial representativeness of conservation research in this remarkable ecosystem.

Drier climate shifts leaf morphology in Amazonian trees.

The humid forests of Amazonia are experiencing longer and more intense dry seasons, which are predicted to intensify by the end of the 21st century. Although tree species often have long generation times, they may still have the capacity to rapidly respond to changing climatic conditions through adaptive phenotypic plasticity. We, therefore, predicted that Amazonian trees have shifted their leaf morphology in response to the recent drier climate. We tested this prediction by analysing historical herbarium specimens of six Amazonian tree species collected over a 60-year period and comparing changes in leaf morphology with historical precipitation data. Moreover, we explored spatial and temporal biases in herbarium specimens and accounted for their potentially confounding effect in our analysis. We found pronounced biases in herbarium specimens, with nearly 20% of specimens collected in close geographic proximity and around the 1975s. When accounting for such biases, our results indicate a trend of decreasing leaf size after the 1970s, which may have been spurred by an observed reduction in rainfall. Our findings support the hypothesis that (some) Amazonian trees have the capacity to adaptively change their leaf phenotypes in response to the recent drier climate. Nevertheless, the unavoidable spatial and temporal biases in herbarium specimens call for caution when generalizing our findings to all Amazonian trees.

Riverine fishers' knowledge of extreme climatic events in the Brazilian Amazonia.

BACKGROUND: Climate change is altering climate patterns, mainly increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme events with potentially serious impacts on natural resources and the people that use them. Adapting to such impacts will require the integration of scientific and local (folk) knowledge, especially the first-hand experiences and perceptions of resource users such as fishers. In this study, we identify how commercial riverine fishers in the Amazon remember extreme climatic events (flood and drought) and how they face the consequences of extreme events on fish availability. METHODS: Data were collected from the main Manaus fishery harbor between June and October of 2013. Semi-structured questionnaires and a historical timeline technique were used to gather data from artisanal commercial fishers. Fishers' knowledge of extreme climate events was assessed by their "cultural consensus" for identification of event years and perceived impacts. Fishers' responses were also compared to hydrological data to test their similarity. RESULTS: There was a high level of cultural consensus among fishers about extreme events years. They were able to identify four consecutive unusual droughts, between 2009 and 2012. Elevated levels of fish mortality and decreases in the fishery were perceived as consequences of the drought events, as well as, a reduction in fish size, and disappearance of some species. Extreme flood events were associated with greater difficulties accessing fishing grounds. CONCLUSIONS: Extreme climatic events (floods and droughts) were remembered, and the recent increase in their intensity and frequency was also perceived. Moreover, extreme climate event (mainly droughts) impacts on fishery resources were also observed. Such information is potentially valuable for educational programs to further improve adaptation of local Amazonian fishing communities to future climate change, e.g. increasing local ecological knowledge using learning material based on their perception.

Patterns of land use, extensification, and intensification of Brazilian agriculture.

Sustainable intensification of agriculture is one of the main strategies to provide global food security. However, its implementation raises enormous political, technological, and social challenges. Meeting these challenges will require, among other things, accurate information on the spatial and temporal patterns of agricultural land use and yield. Here, we investigate historical patterns of agricultural land use (1940-2012) and productivity (1990-2012) in Brazil using a new high-resolution (approximately 1 km(2) ) spatially explicit reconstruction. Although Brazilian agriculture has been historically known for its extensification over natural vegetation (Amazon and Cerrado), data from recent years indicate that extensification has slowed down and was replaced by a strong trend of intensification. Our results provide the first comprehensive historical overview of agricultural land use and productivity in Brazil, providing clear insights to guide future territorial planning, sustainable agriculture, policy, and decision-making.