Most often read

Power lines are a major cause of bird mortality due to electrocutions and collisions.

This threat has been poorly studied in South America.

Scientific and grey literature suggest this threat is present in this subcontinent.

A total of 85 bird species from 34 families affected by power lines were identified.

More studies assessing bird mortality due to this threat in South America are needed.

More than 12% of the watersheds of the Brazilian Amazon already have or are approaching natural forest cover below 30% and more than a third have below 80%.

Regions of the Amazon already forest cover below the average of the Atlantic Forest.

We propose learning policy lessons from the Atlantic Forest to avoid the same trajectory as the Amazon.

They need to be implemented urgently to stop the route towards its tipping point, address the climate emergency and assure the provision of ecosystem services.

Identifying and mapping strategic areas is a starting point for conservation and restoration actions.

Different participator perspectives allow changes in the methodology originally adopted.

The participatory approach provides highly effective and assessable mapping prioritization.

There is room for expansion in the academic engagement with businesses in Brazil, notably in issues related to biodiversity and sustainability.

To tackle existing issues: offsets, licensing, and private reserves are fronts for engagement between academia and businesses in Brazil.

To tap into new opportunities: sustainable bioeconomy, access and benefit sharing, and environmental, social, and corporate governance are topics whereby academia-businesses partnerships in Brazil can innovate.

A mindset shift in academia and corporations will be required to foster sustainable businesses from a biodiversity perspective.

Limited Global South participation and parachute science hampers tropical ecology.

Upgrades in equity, diversity and inclusion rooted in the Global South are essential.

Tropical conservation practices must be led by local researchers and stakeholders.

Recognition of science in the Global South may improve through outreach.

International research must provide equitable workloads and recognition to Global South researchers.

Brazil has the highest number of threatened avian taxa.

Taxa eligibility for ex situ conservation is not correlated to level of threat.

Larger taxa with easily replicable diets are predominant in ex situ conservation facilities.

Presence in traffic favors taxa eligibility for ex situ conservation plans.

Ex situ conservation reach is constrained by the lack of experimentation and of risk-taking.

References are key to restoration, especially in highly threatened ecosystems.

Optimal references connect conservation and restoration.

Small remnants that serve as references can lead to landscape-scale benefits.

A detailed habitat classification is needed for adequate protection and restoration.

Ensuring optimal references protection will benefit future restoration initiatives.

Colombia covers over half of key wintering areas for migratory birds in South America.

Most of the migrants’ overwinter range overlaps with working landscapes.

Priority national restoration/rehabilitation areas are ineffective to benefit migrants.

Forest conservation needs actions involving vulnerable and minority groups.

The KBA Standards may not be scalable to all biodiversity.

If everywhere can be a Key Biodiversity Area, nowhere is “Key”.

If any area is “Key” the assessment process is solely based on manageability.

We evaluated 7 water-related ES in landscapes with different proportions between eucalyptus and natural forests.

There is a threshold close to 20% of forest coverage below which ES supply tends to become unsustainable.

The highest gain to the seven ES occurs in catchments with natural forest cover over 45%.

Erosion control was the service most linked to natural forest decrease.

Damage costs from biological invasions and natural hazards are of similar magnitude.

Global biological invasion costs increased by 702% from 1980–1999 to 2000–2019.

Invasion costs increased faster than natural hazard damages over time (1980–2019).

Not all invasive grasses would be equally affected by climate change.

Range retractions are projected for some species regardless of the scenario.

We expect species niches to shift to areas not yet occupied.

Arundo donax had the greatest range expansion in the SSP3 and SSP5 scenarios.

Secondary and old-growth subtropical Brazilian Atlantic Forests are acting as carbon sink.

Biodiversity is not related to net carbon change in this region.

Subtropical Brazilian Atlantic Forests should be conserved irrespective to their ages to maintain carbon sink.

Biodiversity and carbon-related processes should be taken as conservation targets.

Forest loss leads to decline in tree species richness.

Species richness is effective for recording biodiversity responses to deforestation.

Extinction debt might not be masking long-term effects of deforestation.

High conservation value of disturbed forests, in terms of evolutionary history.

Disturbed forests are partly maintaining ecosystem function now, and in the future.

Protecting further 6.75% of the Cerrado doubles representation of endemic tetrapods.

Larger priority areas for conservation are concentrated in northern Cerrado.

Small and m edium priority areas are scattered across southern Cerrado.

Our ability to represent endemic terrestrial vertebrates decreased with recent habitat loss.

Habitat loss precludes the representation of tetrapods in large top priority areas.

The role of intraspecific variation across levels of biological organization is an unanswered question in invaded and non-invaded pollination networks.

Significant intraspecific variation was detected in the pollen loads and pollen deposition of the invasive plant Impatiens glandulifera.

Only a few individual pollinators carried large amounts of alien pollen grains, potentially function as super-spreaders driving the invading process.

Node and structural specialization were higher for individual-based and pollen-transfer networks in comparison to species-level and pollen-transport networks.

These findings shed light on the mechanisms of the (re)organization of population niches and the invasion biology dynamics scaling-up to community and ecosystem functioning.

A country-level database of useful native plants is provided.

Plant families with high species richness have a high number of useful species.

Plant species with great cultural importance are frequent in the landscape.

70% of useful native plant species are used exclusively in one region.

Differences in the plants used reflect the biogeographical affinities between regions.

Diel activity of 45% of birds and 36% of mammals assessed significantly changed in areas with higher human pressures.

In general Mammals became more nocturnal, while birds became more diurnal.

For birds increased diurnality may not be strongly associated with direct human pressures like hunting, and instead with habitat disturbance.

Our results align with other studies that show increased nocturnality for mammals in areas with high human pressure.

Opposing behavioural responses to humans among vertebrates have repercussions for intraguild predation, competition and conservation considerations.

We identified 52 community-based monitoring projects on game terrestrial fauna in the tropics.

Most of these initiatives (86%) were interrupted due the lack of funding.

The absence of spatio-temporal data analyses prevented the provision of information on monitored resource.

The empowerment and management actions were hampered by the lack of local participation.

Community-based approaches will be more efficient if they engage local people at all stages of the monitoring.

We extracted hummingbird-plant data from an online photograph platform.

Data were compared with expert collected data, available in the literature.

There were some similarities between citizen and expert data.

For the hummingbirds, overlap in plant species interacting was generally low.

Unstructured citizen science data can be a rich source of interaction information.