Guia Aves do Brasil: Mata Atlântica do Sudeste / Brazil Birds Guide Atlantic Forest South-East

Este é o segundo volume de uma série que aborda as aves de todos os biomas brasileiros. Desta vez, são apresentadas 927 espécies de aves da Mata Atlântica com ocorrência nos estados de São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro e Espírito Santo, além do leste de Minas Gerais e sul da Bahia. As descrições são acompanhadas de ilustrações precisas – são mais de 1300, feitas por renomados artistas especializados em aves, como Guy Tudor, o maior ilustrador de aves sul-americanas. Em suas 432 páginas, o livro traz informações dos ambientes, épocas e altitudes de ocorrência, características físicas, dicas para diferenciação de espécies semelhantes e breves descrições de comportamento e voz.Entre as espécies apresentadas estão as saíras sete-cores e de-lenço, algumas das aves mais coloridas do Brasil. Outra espécie que se destaca é a harpia, também conhecida como gavião-real, a maior ave de rapina do Brasil e considerada a mais poderosa do mundo. De ocorrência rara, chama a atenção por seu enorme tamanho, mas é discreta e costuma ficar o tempo todo dentro da mata. Como não tem medo de pessoas e raramente foge, esta espécie é vítima de caçadores e traficantes de animais, fator que agrava sua situação de vulnerabilidade, já ameaçada pela destruição florestal.O Guia também apresenta ao público alguns mistérios, como a história do tietê-de-coroa, hoje a ave mais “procurada” do Brasil, considerada como o sonho de muitos observadores. Passou 150 anos sem registro, até um casal ser avistado em 1996. De lá para cá, esse passarinho miúdo não foi mais visto.Com um formato compacto, considerado mais eficiente para o uso em campo, esta obra tem um preço acessível graças ao desejo dos editores de estimular a observação dos pássaros no Brasil, uma prática adequada para pessoas de qualquer idade e condição física...

Guia Aves do Brasil: Pantanal e Cerrado / Brazil Birds Guide Pantanal and Cerrado

O Guia “Aves do Brasil: Pantanal & Cerrado” foi criado para atender àqueles que se interessam pela observação de aves reunindo, através de rica ilustração, todas as espécies de habitam o pantanal e cerrado brasileiro.Com cerca de 336 páginas, 1020 ilustrações e 740 espécies de pássaros, o guia é um produto inédito, fruto do envolvimento dos maiores especialistas sobre a fauna da região e de alguns dos melhores ilustradores de pássaros do mundo, auxiliados por cartógrafos de renomada experiência. A equipe responsável pelo livro teve o respaldo de instituições de pesquisa e conservação da natureza, bancos de dados científicos e os mais modernos recursos de cartografia.Para facilitar o uso em campo, o guia é compacto, de forma a caber em bolsas e daypacks. As primeiras 50 páginas apresentam dados de conservação dos biomas Pantanal e Cerrado, e a importância que as aves tem nessa proteção. O restante do Guia tem seções para identificar as aves de cada espécie. Praticamente todas as espécies de aves residentes no Pantanal e Cerrado, além das migratórias regulares, estão ilustradas a cores e com textos individuais ao lado, para facilitar a consulta. As espécies ameaçadas ou importantes para a conservação ganham destaque.Ilustrado com mapas de última geração, com descrições de ambientes típicos da região, relação das áreas de alta importância para o meio ambiente e propostas de ação efetiva, o guia Aves do Brasil não tem apenas um valor descritivo ou informativo, mas também propostas concretas para a conservação de áreas relevantes da biodiversidade da região...

The coincidence of climatic and species rarity: high risk to small-range species from climate change.

Why do areas with high numbers of small-range species occur where they do? We found that, for butterfly and plant species in Europe, and for bird species in the Western Hemisphere, such areas coincide with regions that have rare climates, and are higher and colder areas than surrounding regions. Species with small range sizes also tend to occur in climatically diverse regions, where species are likely to have been buffered from extinction in the past. We suggest that the centres of high small-range species richness we examined predominantly represent interglacial relict areas where cold-adapted species have been able to survive unusually warm periods in the last ca 10000 years. We show that the rare climates that occur in current centres of species rarity will shrink disproportionately under future climate change, potentially leading to high vulnerability for many of the species they contain.

Putting beta-diversity on the map: broad-scale congruence and coincidence in the extremes.

Beta-diversity, the change in species composition between places, is a critical but poorly understood component of biological diversity. Patterns of beta-diversity provide information central to many ecological and evolutionary questions, as well as to conservation planning. Yet beta-diversity is rarely studied across large extents, and the degree of similarity of patterns among taxa at such scales remains untested. To our knowledge, this is the first broad-scale analysis of cross-taxon congruence in beta-diversity, and introduces a new method to map beta-diversity continuously across regions. Congruence between amphibian, bird, and mammal beta-diversity in the Western Hemisphere varies with both geographic location and spatial extent. We demonstrate that areas of high beta-diversity for the three taxa largely coincide, but areas of low beta-diversity exhibit little overlap. These findings suggest that similar processes lead to high levels of differentiation in amphibian, bird, and mammal assemblages, while the ecological and biogeographic factors influencing homogeneity in vertebrate assemblages vary. Knowledge of beta-diversity congruence can help formulate hypotheses about the mechanisms governing regional diversity patterns and should inform conservation, especially as threat from global climate change increases.

Global distribution and conservation of rare and threatened vertebrates.

Global conservation strategies commonly assume that different taxonomic groups show congruent geographical patterns of diversity, and that the distribution of extinction-prone species in one group can therefore act as a surrogate for vulnerable species in other groups when conservation decisions are being made. The validity of these assumptions remains unclear, however, because previous tests have been limited in both geographical and taxonomic extent. Here we use a database on the global distribution of 19,349 living bird, mammal and amphibian species to show that, although the distribution of overall species richness is very similar among these groups, congruence in the distribution of rare and threatened species is markedly lower. Congruence is especially low among the very rarest species. Cross-taxon congruence is also highly scale dependent, being particularly low at the finer spatial resolutions relevant to real protected areas. 'Hotspots' of rarity and threat are therefore largely non-overlapping across groups, as are areas chosen to maximize species complementarity. Overall, our results indicate that 'silver-bullet' conservation strategies alone will not deliver efficient conservation solutions. Instead, priority areas for biodiversity conservation must be based on high-resolution data from multiple taxa.

Energy, range dynamics and global species richness patterns: reconciling mid-domain effects and environmental determinants of avian diversity.

Spatial patterns of species richness follow climatic and environmental variation, but could reflect random dynamics of species ranges (the mid-domain effect, MDE). Using data on the global distribution of birds, we compared predictions based on energy availability (actual evapotranspiration, AET, the best single correlate of avian richness) with those of range dynamics models. MDE operating within the global terrestrial area provides a poor prediction of richness variation, but if it operates separately within traditional biogeographic realms, it explains more global variation in richness than AET. The best predictions, however, are given by a model of global range dynamics modulated by AET, such that the probability of a range spreading into an area is proportional to its AET. This model also accurately predicts the latitudinal variation in species richness and variation of species richness both within and between realms, thus representing a compelling mechanism for the major trends in global biodiversity.

Global patterns of geographic range size in birds.

Large-scale patterns of spatial variation in species geographic range size are central to many fundamental questions in macroecology and conservation biology. However, the global nature of these patterns has remained contentious, since previous studies have been geographically restricted and/or based on small taxonomic groups. Here, using a database on the breeding distributions of birds, we report the first (to our knowledge) global maps of variation in species range sizes for an entire taxonomic class. We show that range area does not follow a simple latitudinal pattern. Instead, the smallest range areas are attained on islands, in mountainous areas, and largely in the southern hemisphere. In contrast, bird species richness peaks around the equator, and towards higher latitudes. Despite these profoundly different latitudinal patterns, spatially explicit models reveal a weak tendency for areas with high species richness to house species with significantly smaller median range area. Taken together, these results show that for birds many spatial patterns in range size described in geographically restricted analyses do not reflect global rules. It remains to be discovered whether global patterns in geographic range size are best interpreted in terms of geographical variation in species assemblage packing, or in the rates of speciation, extinction, and dispersal that ultimately underlie biodiversity.

Global hotspots of species richness are not congruent with endemism or threat.

Biodiversity hotspots have a prominent role in conservation biology, but it remains controversial to what extent different types of hotspot are congruent. Previous studies were unable to provide a general answer because they used a single biodiversity index, were geographically restricted, compared areas of unequal size or did not quantitatively compare hotspot types. Here we use a new global database on the breeding distribution of all known extant bird species to test for congruence across three types of hotspot. We demonstrate that hotspots of species richness, threat and endemism do not show the same geographical distribution. Only 2.5% of hotspot areas are common to all three aspects of diversity, with over 80% of hotspots being idiosyncratic. More generally, there is a surprisingly low overall congruence of biodiversity indices, with any one index explaining less than 24% of variation in the other indices. These results suggest that, even within a single taxonomic class, different mechanisms are responsible for the origin and maintenance of different aspects of diversity. Consequently, the different types of hotspots also vary greatly in their utility as conservation tools.