Tropical forests are recognized for their role in providing diverse ecosystem services (ESs), with carbon uptake the best recognized. The capacity of tropical forests to provide ESs is strongly ...linked to their enormous biodiversity. However, causal relationships between biodiversity and ESs are poorly understood. This may be because biodiversity is often translated into species richness. Here, we argue that focusing on multiple attributes of biodiversity—structure, composition, and function—will make relationships between biodiversity and ESs clearer. In this review, we discuss the ecological processes behind ESs from tropical humid and subhumid forests of South America. Our main goal is to understand the links between the ESs and those three biodiversity attributes. While supporting and regulating services relate more closely to forest structure and function, provisioning services relate more closely to forest composition and function, and cultural services are more related to structure and composition attributes. In this sense, ESs from subhumid forests (savannas) differ from those provided by the Amazon Forest, although both ecosystems are recognized as harboring tremendous biodiversity. Given this, if anthropogenic drivers of change promote a shift in the Amazon Forest toward savanna—the savannization hypothesis—the types of services provided will change, especially climate regulating services. This review emphasizes the importance of deeply understanding ecosystem structure, composition, and function to better understand the services ecosystems provide. Understanding that anthropogenic impacts on biodiversity occur through these three main attributes, it becomes easier to anticipate how humans will impact ESs.
Key Points
Tropical forests' biodiversity promotes diverse ecosystem services (ESs), but relationships between biodiversity and ESs are not obvious
Different ES types are related to different attributes of biodiversity: structure, composition, and functions
Savannization of Amazonia could impact the types of ESs provided by rain forests, particularly climate regulating services
•We assess the socioeconomics of smallholders in Madre de Dios region.•Net income originates from agriculture, husbandry and nontimber forest products.•The Interoceanic Highway has contributed little ...to improving smallholder livelihoods.•Roads must also bring education, health and local economic development policies.
Significant research efforts have been devoted to characterizing smallholding productive systems and assessing the relative contribution of small-scale farming to global food production. However, there is a noted paucity of studies addressing the determinants of and contributors to income generation of smallholders around the world, particularly in the Amazon forest. Moreover, while road development in the Amazon has been heavily discussed, the impacts of infrastructure projects, such as road paving, on smallholders’ livelihoods remain uncertain. Here we explore the relevance of agriculture, livestock rearing and collection of non-timber forest products (NTFP) as income providers of smallholders in the Amazon forest in Madre de Dios-Peru, after the paving of Interoceanic South Highway (ISH), a large infrastructural project connecting Acre state in Brazil with Cusco in Peru. We interviewed 62 smallholder families in an area of 403 km2 along the road from Iñapari to Mazuko near the tri-national border of Brazil, Perú and Bolivia. We applied a multinomial statistical model to estimate the proportion of annual net revenue related to each productive system from selected predictor variables. Our results show that smallholders’ net revenue originates from a mix of productive systems including agriculture (rice, corn), livestock rearing (cows) and others (poultry, pigs, sheep) as well as NTFP extractivist activities (Brazil nut). Average net revenue is of USD 35.2 ± 25.7 ha−1yr−1 suggesting that economic returns to smallholders remain low even after the paving of ISH. This indicates that connection with markets alone is not sufficient to increase rents of smallholder families.
•We estimate an annual production of açaí in Acre as of 850 thousand tonnes.•Açaí contributes to 17% of the household rents.•Well-established extractivists shift to cattle ranching even inside ...sustainable use reserves.
Non-Timber Forest Products (NTFPs) contribute to the livelihoods of more than 6 million households in the Brazilian Amazon. Of the three most important NTFPs in the Brazilian Amazon – rubber, Brazil nut, and açaí – the latter is the least known, but the one with the most potential and fastest growing markets. Here we map the socioecology of açaí extractive systems in the Western Amazon state of Acre, Brazil. We interviewed 49 extractivists in settlements and in the emblematic Extractivist Reserve Chico Mendes (RCM) to model ecology (tree density, productivity) and production chain of açaí (prices, costs and net revenues) for an area of 164,000 km2. We estimate a potential annual production of 850 thousand tons for the entire Acre State, which could generate net revenues of US$ 71 million/yr. This is well above the average production of 136 thousand tonnes (over the last 25 years). Net revenues average US$ 57 ha−1.yr−1, with açaí contributing, on average, to 17% of the annual household income. In two case studies, we found a diversity of livelihoods comprising agriculture, NTFP collection, and livestock rearing that were grouped in two broad types of extractivist livelihoods: “old” and “new” settlers. Our results suggest that old settlers tend to focus on cattle ranching as their main economic activity, even inside extractive reserves (RESEX). The shift from extractivist activities to cattle ranching undermines the conservation role of this type of protected area. We conclude that without significant financial support in the forms of subsidies and other development programs NTFPs will continue to struggle against the economics of cattle ranching.
There is a noted lack of information on the effectiveness of investments in forest fire management in Brazil. Here, we quantify the budget expenditures of one private and one public fire-management ...program. We then compare burned areas within conservation units (CUs) and private rural properties (PPs) with and without investments in fire management in the Brazilian Amazon and Cerrado biomes. Investments in fire management in CUs total US$ 0.51 ha−1 yr−1 in the Amazon and US$ 5.32 ha−1 yr−1 in the Cerrado. Roughly, 94% of the public investment in fire management in CUs is only assigned to suppression activities, although seven CUs in Cerrado have undertaken innovative Integrated Fire Management (IFM) that includes prevention practices. Cerrado CUs with brigades for fire suppression have reduced burned area by 12%, on average, compared with CUs without brigades. Further, CUs that also included prevention practices as part of IFM reduced burned areas by an additional 6% from CUs with only fire suppression practices. Investments in both fire prevention and suppression on private lands amounted to US$ 15.89 ha−1 yr−1. We identify a reduction of 50%, on average, in burned areas after PPs joined the fire mitigation program of Aliança da Terra. In face of increasingly disruptive wildfires alongside finite financial resources, we call for the need of a mix of cost-effective private and public fire management programs with strong emphasis on prevention practices.
•We quantify budget expenditures and the effectiveness of fire-management programs in Brazilian Amazon and Cerrado biomes.•Despite the greater emphasis given to fire suppression, investments in fire management reduced burned areas.•Innovative Integrated Fire Management (IFM) programs in seven Cerrado conservation units have further reduced burned areas.•Rural properties reduced burned areas by 50% after entering the socioenvironmental registry of ONG Aliança da Terra.•Our results support the need for a more comprehensive IFM approach that includes cost-effectiveness analyses.
Influenza virus infections pose a significant threat to public health due to annual seasonal epidemics and occasional pandemics. Influenza is also associated with significant economic losses in ...animal production. The most effective way to prevent influenza infections is through vaccination. Current vaccine programs rely heavily on the vaccine's ability to stimulate neutralizing antibody responses to the hemagglutinin (HA) protein. One of the biggest challenges to an effective vaccination program lies on the fact that influenza viruses are ever-changing, leading to antigenic drift that results in escape from earlier immune responses. Efforts toward overcoming these challenges aim at improving the strength and/or breadth of the immune response. Novel vaccine technologies, the so-called universal vaccines, focus on stimulating better cross-protection against many or all influenza strains. However, vaccine platforms or manufacturing technologies being tested to improve vaccine efficacy are heterogeneous between different species and/or either tailored for epidemic or pandemic influenza. Here, we discuss current vaccines to protect humans and animals against influenza, highlighting challenges faced to effective and uniform novel vaccination strategies and approaches.
Here, we analyze critical changes in environmental law enforcement in the Brazilian Amazon between 2000 and 2020. Based on a dataset of law enforcement indicators, we discuss how these changes ...explain recent Amazon deforestation dynamics. Our analysis also covers changes in the legal prosecution process and documents a militarization of enforcement between 2018 and 2022. From 2004 to 2018, 43.6 thousand land-use embargoes and 84.3 thousand fines were issued, targeting 3.3 million ha of land, and totaling USD 9.3 billion in penalties. Nevertheless, enforcement relaxed and became spatially more limited, signaling an increasing lack of commitment by the State to enforcing the law. The number of embargoes and asset confiscations dropped by 59% and 55% in 2019 and 2020, respectively. These changes were accompanied by a marked increase in enforcement expenditure, suggesting a massive efficiency loss. More importantly, the creation of so-called conciliation hearings and the centralization of legal processes in 2019 reduced the number of actual judgments and fines collected by 85% and decreased the ratio between lawsuits resulting in paid fines over filed ones from 17 to 5%. As Brazil gears up to crack-down on illegal deforestation once again, our assessment suggests urgent entry points for policy action.
Human-like swine H3 influenza A viruses (IAV) were detected by the USDA surveillance system. We characterized two novel swine human-like H3N2 and H3N1 viruses with hemagglutinin (HA) genes similar to ...those in human seasonal H3 strains and internal genes closely related to those of 2009 H1N1 pandemic viruses. The H3N2 neuraminidase (NA) was of the contemporary human N2 lineage, while the H3N1 NA was of the classical swine N1 lineage. Both viruses were antigenically distant from swine H3 viruses that circulate in the United States and from swine vaccine strains and also showed antigenic drift from human seasonal H3N2 viruses. Their pathogenicity and transmission in pigs were compared to those of a human H3N2 virus with a common HA ancestry. Both swine human-like H3 viruses efficiently infected pigs and were transmitted to indirect contacts, whereas the human H3N2 virus did so much less efficiently. To evaluate the role of genes from the swine isolates in their pathogenesis, reverse genetics-generated reassortants between the swine human-like H3N1 virus and the seasonal human H3N2 virus were tested in pigs. The contribution of the gene segments to virulence was complex, with the swine HA and internal genes showing effects in vivo. The experimental infections indicate that these novel H3 viruses are virulent and can sustain onward transmission in pigs, and the naturally occurring mutations in the HA were associated with antigenic divergence from H3 IAV from humans and swine. Consequently, these viruses could have a significant impact on the swine industry if they were to cause more widespread outbreaks, and the potential risk of these emerging swine IAV to humans should be considered.
Pigs are important hosts in the evolution of influenza A viruses (IAV). Human-to-swine transmissions of IAV have resulted in the circulation of reassortant viruses containing human-origin genes in pigs, greatly contributing to the diversity of IAV in swine worldwide. New human-like H3N2 and H3N1 viruses that contain a mix of human and swine gene segments were recently detected by the USDA surveillance system. The human-like viruses efficiently infected pigs and resulted in onward airborne transmission, likely due to the multiple changes identified between human and swine H3 viruses. The human-like swine viruses are distinct from contemporary U.S. H3 swine viruses and from the strains used in swine vaccines, which could have a significant impact on the swine industry due to a lack of population immunity. Additionally, public health experts should consider an appropriate assessment of the risk of these emerging swine H3 viruses for the human population.
Cross-species transmission events and mixed infection of small ruminant lentiviruses (SRLVs) were studied in seven goats and two sheep from three small ruminant mixed flocks from Northeast and ...Southeast Brazil. Genetic and antigenic analyses with gag/env genes and ELISA multiepitope SU1/SU5 recombinant antigens were carried out, respectively. The genetic analysis of gag and env sequences showed high viral diversity in both species, MVV-like (subtype A1) and CAEV-like B1 in goats, and CAEV-like (subtype B1) in sheep, revealing SRLV interspecies transmission from sheep to goats and vice versa in Brazilian farms. Two Brazilian caprine lentiviruses were segregated in two new genetic clades based on gag analyses, which suggests a new classification into heterogenic genotype A. Furthermore, goat isolates were grouped into subtype A1 and B1 clusters. Cross-reactive antibodies were detected in goats using ELISA with a recombinant antigen carrying SU1 and SU5 immunodominant epitopes; the results showed anti-CAEV and MVV antibodies in goats and anti-CAEV antibodies in sheep. This result can be associated with the high divergence in the V4 region due to SRLV variability. All results confirm cross-species infection of SRLV in Brazilian mixed herds.
•Goat from mixed farm was dually infected with arthritis-encephalitis virus (CAEV) and visna-maedi virus (MVV) –like.•Brazilian SRLV goat sequences were identified as visna-maedi virus-like, divergent subtype in A groupe.•Brazilian SRLV sheep sequences were related to CAEV viruses, subtype B1.•Cross-species infection of SRLV in Brazilian mixed herds.
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