Effects of habitat degradation on inferring the local dominance of tree species in the Amazon rainforest

• Grant number: 25/15581-6
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Post-doctor
• Start date: December 01, 2025
• End date: May 31, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Biological Sciences - Ecology - Theoretical Ecology
• Principal Investigator: Mathias Mistretta Pires
• Grantee: Maurício Humberto Vancine
• Supervisor: Paulo Monteiro Brando
• Host Institution: Instituto de Biologia (IB). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Yale School Of The Environment, United States
• Associated to the scholarship: 24/19865-6 - Impacts of edge effects, fire, and climate change on vegetation composition and functional diversity across spatial scales in the Amazon rainforest, BP.PD

Abstract

The combined effects of climate change and land-use transformations have intensified forest disturbances and raised concerns about a potential large-scale collapse of Amazonian forests by mid-century. Although habitat degradation caused by edge effects, logging, fire, and drought is well documented, the synergistic impacts of these stressors-particularly at forest edges-on tree species remain poorly understood, with serious implications for biodiversity conservation, carbon storage, and ecosystem resilience. This project aims to predict how tree species respond to local disturbances-including edge effects, fires, droughts, and windthrow events-by incorporating habitat degradation into models of their regional potential distribution across the Amazon. During this Research Internship Abroad, we will integrate landscape metrics and remote sensing data into species distribution models to understand how habitat degradation affects tree population dynamics in a long-term local-scale experiment. We hypothesize that species with narrow ecological niches in terms of climate, soil, topography, and habitat degradation tolerance will be more vulnerable to local disturbances, as indicated by lower abundance in a 20-year experiment in southeastern Amazonia. Specifically, we predict that species with greater local dominance in the experiment with greater disturbance will have potential distributions associated with drier and warmer conditions and in more degraded habitats. Our findings are expected to improve understanding of how local-scale disturbances impact species with varying habitat requirements across multiple spatial scales. Moreover, these insights can support the development of more effective conservation strategies and enhance predictions of species responses to anthropogenic habitat degradation and climate change in the Amazon. (AU)