Biology subjects

Antunes, A. C.

Publications and source records attributed to Antunes, A. C..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Forest degradation reshapes trophic functioning in vertebrate food webs across Amazonian forests

The Amazon is a mosaic of ecosystems, accounting for 13% of all known species globally, and responsible for providing a variety of ecosystem services, including a key role in global climate regulation. However, 18% of the Amazon forest cover has been lost completely and a further 38% degraded, threatening biodiversity and millions of local livelihoods. Currently, little is known about how this impacts the functioning of ecological communities. Here, we combine an energetic approach with biodiversity metrics to quantify ecosystem functioning in mammal and bird food webs across Amazonia, along a gradient of forest degradation linked to road proximity. We show that even under relatively low disturbance, ecosystem functions shift: carnivory increases closer to roads, driven by generalist species that persist under these conditions, whereas herbivory declines mainly due to reduced herbivore biomass and species richness. This suggests that processes associated with forest degradation can alter energy flow even where biodiversity metrics remain relatively unchanged, highlighting energetic approaches as sensitive indicators of ecosystem disruption.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2023

Quantitative description of six fish species' gut contents and abundances of their prey in the benthic food web of the Baltic Sea (1968-1978)

The dataset presents a compilation of stomach contents from six demersal fish species from two functional groups inhabiting the Baltic Sea. It includes detailed information on prey identities, body masses, and biomasses recovered from both the fishs digestive systems and their surrounding environment. Environmental parameters, such as salinity and temperature levels, have been integrated to enrich this dataset. The juxtaposition of information on prey found in stomachs and in the environment provides an opportunity to quantify trophic interactions across different environmental contexts and investigate how fish foraging behaviour adapts to changes in their environment, such as an increase in temperature. The compilation of body mass and taxonomic information for all species allows approaching these new questions using either a taxonomic (based on species identity) or functional trait (based on body mass) approach.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2022

Global environmental drivers of local abundance-mass scaling in soil animal communities

The relationship between species body masses and densities is strongly conserved around a three-quarter power law when pooling data across communities. However, studies of local within-community relationships have revealed major deviations from this general pattern, which has profound implications for their stability and functioning. Despite multiple contributions of soil communities to people, there is limited knowledge on the drivers of body mass-abundance relationship in these communities. We compiled a dataset comprising 155 soil-animal communities across four countries (Canada, Germany, Indonesia, USA), all sampled using the same methodology. We tested if variation in local climatic and edaphic conditions drives differences in local body mass-abundance scaling relationships. We found substantial variation in the slopes of this power-law relationship across local communities. Structural equation modeling showed that soil temperature and water content have a positive and negative net effect, respectively, on soil communities. These effects are mediated by changes in local edaphic conditions (soil pH and carbon content) and the body-mass range of the communities. These results highlight ways in which alterations of soil climatic and edaphic conditions interactively impact the distribution of abundance, and thus energy, between populations of small and large animals. These quantitative mechanistic relationships facilitate our understanding of how global changes in environmental conditions, such as temperature and precipitation, will affect community-abundance distributions and thus the stability and functioning of soil-animal communities.

ecology↗