Inara Roberta Leal

I hold a Bachelor's degree in Biological Sciences from the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (1990), a Master's and Ph.D. in Ecology from the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (1994 and 1998), and completed post-doctoral research at CSIRO-Australia (2010 and 2014). Since 2002, I have served as a professor at the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, advising undergraduate students in Biological Sciences and Environmental Sciences, as well as post-graduate students in Plant Biology and Animal Biology. My research focuses on understanding how anthropogenic disturbances influence plant-animal interactions. I conduct research in the two most important ecosystems of northeast Brazil, the Atlantic forest and the Caatinga dry forest, both highly altered by human activities. In the Atlantic forest, I investigate how habitat loss and fragmentation reorganize insect communities (ants, butterflies, dung beetles, and termites), promote herbivore proliferation, particularly leaf-cutting ants, and simplify other plant-ant interactions. In the Caatinga dry forest, my studies involve the effects of acute (slash-and-burn agriculture) and chronic (livestock raising, firewood collection, exploitation of non-timber forest products) anthropogenic disturbances, as well as climate change (increasing aridity) on the organization of plant and animal communities and on ecosystem services provided by ants. I have been a member of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation since 1998, the Ecological Society of America since 2000, the Associação Brasileira de Ecologia since 2012, and the Academia Pernambucana de Ciências since 2023. My profile in Researcher ID of Web of Science is: E-8362-2010. (Source: Lattes Curriculum)