Priority setting for restoration in surrounding savannic areas of the Brazilian Pantanal based on soil loss risk and agrarian structure.

Soil health is at the core of the sustainability agenda. As in many agroecosystems in the tropics, soil erosion is a major issue in poorly managed pasturelands. A noteworthy case is located in the Upper Taquari River Basin (UTRB), as part of the Upper Paraguay Basin on the plateau with drainage waters for the Taquari megafan in the Brazilian Pantanal. Here we combine slope (S-factor), erodibility (E-factor), rainfall-rainy day ratio (R-factor), and vegetation and soil indices (C-factor) to locate erosion risk and prioritize eco-engineering interventions via palisades and small dams in UTRB. The method consisted of assessing distinct weights between Universal Soil Loss Equation (USLE) factors in a GIS platform, providing 35 combinations of classes as low, moderate, high, and very high erosive risk. The validation of the method was based on the ravine and plain ground truths obtained from high-resolution raster data. The best weight of USLE factors aids to locate critical erosive sites and vegetation patterns. Then, erosion risk and interventions were analyzed according to land use and rural property sizes in the government's Rural Environmental Registry (CAR) database. Overall, the natural factors of slope and erodibility in a proportion of 25% and 75% in GIS algebra provided the best mapping accuracy result. About 65% of the UTRB has high or very high erosion risks, and 70% of the available area can be acknowledged as degraded pasturelands. A total of 4744 erosion interventions were recorded, with an accuracy of 65.28% and 61.15% for check dams and palisades interventions, respectively. The number of necessary interventions in areas of native vegetation was almost 50% higher than in pasturelands. Even though micro landowners occupy most of the watershed, large properties have about ten times as many areas at high risk of erosion. The mutual cooperation between properties, independently of size, is supported by governmental public policies like incentives for ecosystem services restoration of critical gullies, with CAR compliance and fiscalization.

How much leaf area do insects eat? A data set of insect herbivory sampled globally with a standardized protocol.

Herbivory is ubiquitous. Despite being a potential driver of plant distribution and performance, herbivory remains largely undocumented. Some early attempts have been made to review, globally, how much leaf area is removed through insect feeding. Kozlov et al., in one of the most comprehensive reviews regarding global patterns of herbivory, have compiled published studies regarding foliar removal and sampled data on global herbivory levels using a standardized protocol. However, in the review by Kozlov et al., only 15 sampling sites, comprising 33 plant species, were evaluated in tropical areas around the globe. In Brazil, which ranks first in terms of plant biodiversity, with a total of 46,097 species, almost half (43%) being endemic, a single data point was sampled, covering only two plant species. In an attempt to increase knowledge regarding herbivory in tropical plant species and to provide the raw data needed to test general hypotheses related to plant-herbivore interactions across large spatial scales, we proposed a joint, collaborative network to evaluate tropical herbivory. This network allowed us to update and expand the data on insect herbivory in tropical and temperate plant species. Our data set, collected with a standardized protocol, covers 45 sampling sites from nine countries and includes leaf herbivory measurements of 57,239 leaves from 209 species of vascular plants belonging to 65 families from tropical and temperate regions. They expand previous data sets by including a total of 32 sampling sites from tropical areas around the globe, comprising 152 species, 146 of them being sampled in Brazil. For temperate areas, it includes 13 sampling sites, comprising 59 species. Thus, when compared to the most recent comprehensive review of insect herbivory (Kozlov et al.), our data set has increased the base of available data for the tropical plants more than 460% (from 33 to 152 species) and the Brazilian sampling was increased 7,300% (from 2 to 146 species). Data on precise levels of herbivory are presented for more than 57,000 leaves worldwide. There are no copyright restrictions. Please cite this paper when using the current data in publications; the authors request to be informed how the data is used in the publications.