Knowledge gaps hamper understanding the relationship between fragmentation and biodiversity loss: the case of Atlantic Forest fruit-feeding butterflies.

ABSTRACT:

Background

A key challenge for conservation biology in the Neotropics is to understand how deforestation affects biodiversity at various levels of landscape fragmentation. Addressing this challenge requires expanding the coverage of known biodiversity data, which remain to date restricted to a few well-surveyed regions. Here, we assess the sampling coverage and biases in biodiversity data on fruit-feeding butterflies at the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, discussing their effect on our understanding of the relationship between forest fragmentation and biodiversity at a large-scale. We hypothesize that sampling effort is biased towards large and connected fragments, which occur jointly in space at the Atlantic forest.

Methods

We used a comprehensive dataset of Atlantic Forest frui

SUBMITTER: Sobral-Souza T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8237826 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature