Study on Amazon forest domestication wins thesis of the year
The doctoral thesis of Carolina Levis at INPA's graduate program in Ecology was chosen as best thesis of 2019 in the area of Biodiversity by Capes, the Brazilian National Council for Higher Education, for her research on the domestication process of the Amazon forest by pre-Columbian populations.
Abundance variation in space and time: a test with Amazonian soil mites
For his doctoral thesis in Ecology, Pedro Aurélio Costa Lima Pequeno used the soil mite, Rostrozetes ovulum in a rainforest environment to test the assumptions that observed spatial abundance patterns are constant over time, and that temporal abundance patterns are constant over space. His results were published in Pedobiologia and showed that the distribution of a species can be highly dynamic, even in sheltered, tropical forest soils. The results have implications for commonly used soil fauna sampling protocols.
The imminent sugarcane expansion into the Amazon
On the day the Brazilian senate almost opened the Amazon region to sugarcane plantation, a letter in Science by Lucas Ferrante and Philip Fearnside alerts to the dangers that this liberation represents for Amazonian ecosystem integrity. Lucas currently works on his doctoral thesis in Ecology at INPA.
