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To reduce future loss of biodiversity and to allocate conservation funds effectively, the major drivers behind large-scale extinction processes must be identified. A promising approach is to link the red-list status of species and specific traits that connect species of functionally important taxa or guilds to resources they rely on. Such traits can be used to detect the influence of anthropogenic ecosystem changes and conservation efforts on species, which allows for practical recommendations for conservation. We modeled the German Red List categories as an ordinal index of extinction risk of 1025 saproxylic beetles with a proportional-odds linear mixed-effects model for ordered categorical responses. In this model, we estimated fixed effects for intrinsic traits characterizing species biology, required resources, and distribution with phylogenetically correlated random intercepts. The model also allowed predictions of extinction risk for species with no red-list category. Our model revealed a higher extinction risk for lowland and large species as well as for species that rely on wood of large diameter, broad-leaved trees, or open canopy. These results mirror well the ecological degradation of European forests over the last centuries caused by modern forestry, that is the conversion of natural broad-leaved forests to dense conifer-dominated forests and the loss of old growth and dead wood. Therefore, conservation activities aimed at saproxylic beetles in all types of forests in Central and Western Europe should focus on lowlands, and habitat management of forest stands should aim at increasing the amount of dead wood of large diameter, dead wood of broad-leaved trees, and dead wood in sunny areas. Para reducir la futura pérdida de biodiversidad y para asignar efectivamente los fondos para la conservación, los conductores principales detrás de los procesos de extinción a gran escala deben ser identificados. Un enfoque prometedor consiste en enlazar el estatus de lista roja de las especies y las características específicas que conectan a las especies de taxones funcionalmente importantes a los recursos de los que dependen. Dichas características pueden usarse para detectar la influencia de cambios de los ecosistemas antropogénicos y los esfuerzos de conservación sobre las especies, lo que permite realizar recomendaciones prácticas para la conservación. Modelamos las categorías de la Lista Roja Alemana como un índice ordinal de riesgo de extinción para 1025 escarabajos saproxílicos con un modelo lineal de efectos mixtos y probabilidades proporcionales para respuestas categóricas ordenadas. En este modelo, estimamos los efectos fijos para las características intrínsecas al categorizar la biología de las especies, los recursos requeridos y la distribución con intercepciones azarosas correlacionadas filogenéticamente. El modelo también permitió predecir riesgos de extinción para especies que no tienen categorías en la lista roja. Nuestro modelo reveló un riesgo de extinción mayor para las especies de tierras bajas y para las de gran tamaño, así como para las especies que dependen de maderas con un gran diámetro, árboles con hojas anchas o un dosel abierto. Estos resultados reflejan bien la degradación ecológica del bosque europeo a través de los últimos siglos causada por la silvicultura moderna, que es la transformación de bosques naturales de árboles con hojas anchas a bosques dominados densamente por coníferas y la pérdida de madera muerta y árboles de viejo crecimiento. Por esto, las actividades de conservación enfocadas a los escarabajos saproxílicos en todos los tipos de bosque en Europa central y occidental deben enfocarse en las tierras bajas, y el manejo de hábitat de los bosques debe centrarse en incrementar la madera muerta de gran diámetro, la de árboles de hojas anchas y la que se encuentra en áreas soleadas.

A key measure of humanity's global impact is by how much it has increased species extinction rates. Familiar statements are that these are 100–1000 times pre‐human or background extinction levels. Estimating recent rates is straightforward, but establishing a background rate for comparison is not. Previous researchers chose an approximate benchmark of 1 extinction per million species per year (E/MSY). We explored disparate lines of evidence that suggest a substantially lower estimate. Fossil data yield direct estimates of extinction rates, but they are temporally coarse, mostly limited to marine hard‐bodied taxa, and generally involve genera not species. Based on these data, typical background loss is 0.01 genera per million genera per year. Molecular phylogenies are available for more taxa and ecosystems, but it is debated whether they can be used to estimate separately speciation and extinction rates. We selected data to address known concerns and used them to determine median extinction estimates from statistical distributions of probable values for terrestrial plants and animals. We then created simulations to explore effects of violating model assumptions. Finally, we compiled estimates of diversification—the difference between speciation and extinction rates for different taxa. Median estimates of extinction rates ranged from 0.023 to 0.135 E/MSY. Simulation results suggested over‐ and under‐estimation of extinction from individual phylogenies partially canceled each other out when large sets of phylogenies were analyzed. There was no evidence for recent and widespread pre‐human overall declines in diversity. This implies that average extinction rates are less than average diversification rates. Median diversification rates were 0.05–0.2 new species per million species per year. On the basis of these results, we concluded that typical rates of background extinction may be closer to 0.1 E/MSY. Thus, current extinction rates are 1,000 times higher than natural background rates of extinction and future rates are likely to be 10,000 times higher.

Mazama temama is the smallest red deer in Central America. It was one of the first species described for the genus, and until the end of the last century many authors considered it as a subspecies of Mazama americana due to morphological similarities. Cytogenetic studies of animals in captivity have shown different karyotypes that led to its recognition as a unique species, and phylogenetic studies sustained the monophyly of the species, with some inconsistencies due to its wide geographical distribution. The objectives of the study were to characterize a topotype of Veracruz and three other specimens from a Campeche locality, to complement the description of M. temama and to propose a neotype for the species. We described this species morphologically (cranial measurements, skin color, and body biometry), and obtained karyorypes from wild animals with known origins for cytogenetic analyses (C band, G band, Ag-NOR, and Giemsa staining). We also performed phylogenetic analyses of Cytb, D-loop, COI, and ND5 mitochondrial genes. The morphometric results separated M. temama from M. americana but not from the other small Mazama species. The phylogenetic trees of mitochondrial genes Cytb, COI, and ND5 corroborated the monophyly of the species with 100% of posterior probability. The topotype's karyotype is significantly different from the one previously described for the species, and the other specimens from Campeche have karyotype variants whose chromosomal rearrangements are possibly the beginning of a reproductive isolation mechanism. We discussed the possibility to have more than one species of red brocket deer in Mexico and Central America.

Understanding the ecological and historical causes and processes that shape biodiversity distribution patterns remains a challenging and fundamental task in biogeography, ecology, and evolution. To address this issue, taxonomic and phylogenetic β diversity can help us to assess the importance of ecological and historical factors that structure these biotic patterns. To make inferences about the processes underlying current spatial patterns in communities of Cricetidae across the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, their taxonomic and phylogenetic β diversity were assessed jointly. Our aims were: 1) to examine taxonomic and phylogenetic β diversity and their turnover and nestedness components among physiographic subprovinces; 2) to test for statistical significance of observed phylogenetic β diversity against the expected values of a null model; and 3) to evaluate if these metrics were correlated with geographical distance. We obtained the species composition for 12 subprovinces based on distribution models for 49 cricetid species present in Oaxaca, then carried out a maximum likelihood analysis to estimate their phylogenetic relationships. Our results show that the taxonomic and phylogenetic dissimilarities mainly were explained by the turnover component of species and lineages. In almost all pairwise comparisons, the null model approach revealed random patterns for phylogenetic β diversity values and its components. Mantel correlation models showed that the values of total taxonomic and phylogenetic diversity and their components are correlated with the geographical distances between subprovinces. Our results suggest that both taxonomic and phylogenetic β diversity are explained by the interplay between biogeographical history from southern Mexico, and the recent speciation processes in cricetid rodents. Given that speciation processes are allopatric for most cricetid taxa, the high values of spatial turnover can be explained by the small ranges of species, coupled with current abiotic conditions that act as filters, promoting specialization of species on particular conditions. Our results show the importance of the phylogenetic approach to unravel the multidimensional spatial patterns of biodiversity.

La incorporación de datos morfométricos en análisis cladísticos plantea desafíos metodológicos, particularmente en el manejo de caracteres continuos y configuraciones de landmarks en matrices con múltiples individuos por taxón. Aunque el programa TNT (Tree analysis using New Technology) ha incorporado funcionalidades para analizar directamente caracteres continuos y morfogeométricos, persiste la necesidad de herramientas complementarias que faciliten la preparación y el procesamiento de estos datos. En este contexto, se presentan dos aplicaciones de código abierto desarrolladas en Python: py_tps2tnt y py_tm2tnt. La primera permite transformar archivos TPS con múltiples individuos por taxón, realizar alineamientos mediante Procrustes, calcular promedios de configuración, determinar rangos para tamaño centroide, seleccionar distancias interlandmarks y exportar distintos tipos de datos al formato TNT. La segunda herramienta, py_tm2tnt, está orientada al tratamiento de datos morfométricos tradicionales, permitiendo calcular intervalos, realizar análisis estadísticos univariados y exportar matrices continuas compatibles con análisis de parsimonia. Ambas aplicaciones ofrecen una interfaz gráfica intuitiva, flexibilidad en la gestión de datos y compatibilidad directa con TNT, lo que facilita su integración en flujos de trabajo filogenéticos. Este trabajo se describe el desarrollo, las funcionalidades principales y las perspectivas de mejora de ambas herramientas, además se informa de los materiales complementarios (videos tutoriales y conjuntos de datos reales e hipotéticos) que pueden ser utilizados para su evaluación y aplicación práctica.

Se propone Topea H. A. Keller como nuevo nombre para el género Aenigma H. A. Keller (Apocynaceae) por prexistir un homónimo fonético. Además, sobre la base de estudios de filogenia molecular se describe dentro de la tribu Asclepiadeae a la nueva subtribu monogenérica Topeinae H. A. Keller & Liede, endémica del Cono Sur de América del Sur.

Key goals of conservation are to protect both species and the functional and genetic diversity they represent. A strictly species-based approach may underrepresent rare, threatened, or genetically distinct species and overrepresent widespread species. Although reserves are created for a number of reasons, including economic, cultural, and ecological reasons, their efficacy has been measured primarily in terms of how well species richness is protected, and it is useful to compare how well they protect other measures of diversity. We used Proteaceae species-occurrence data in the Cape Floristic Region of South Africa to illustrate differences in the spatial distribution of species and evolutionary diversity estimated from a new maximum-likelihood molecular phylogeny. We calculated species richness, phylogenetic diversity (i.e., summed phylogenetic branch lengths in a site), and a site-aggregated measure of biogeographically weighted evolutionary distinctiveness (i.e., an abundance weighted measure that captures the unique proportion of the phylogenetic tree a species represents) for sites throughout the Cape Floristic Region. Species richness and phylogenetic diversity values were highly correlated for sites in the region, but species richness was concentrated at a few sites that underrepresented the much more spatially extensive distribution of phylogenetic diversity. Biogeographically weighted evolutionary diversity produced a scheme of prioritization distinct from the other 2 metrics and highlighted southern sites as conservation priorities. In these sites, the high values of biogeographically weighted evolutionary distinctiveness were the result of a nonrandom relation between evolutionary distinctiveness and geographical rarity, where rare species also tended to have high levels of evolutionary distinctiveness. Such distinct and rare species are of particular concern, but are not captured by conservation schemes that focus on species richness or phylogenetic diversity alone. Las metas clave de la conservación son proteger tanto a especies como a la diversidad funcional y genética que representan. Un enfoque basado estrictamente en especies puede dejar de representar a especies raras, amenazadas o distintas genéticamente y sobrerepresentar especies de distribución amplia. Aunque las reservas son creadas por diversas razones, incluyendo económicas, culturales y ecológicas, su eficacia ha sido medida principalmente en términos de qué tan bien se protege la riqueza de especies. Utilizamos datos de la ocurrencia de especies de Proteaceae en la Región Florística del Cabo en Sudáfrica para ilustrar diferencias en la distribución espacial de especies y diversidad evolutiva estimadas a partir de una filogenia molecular nueva. Calculamos la riqueza de especies, la diversidad filogenética (i.e., suma de longitudes de ramas filogenéticas en un sitio) y una medida agregada de la unicidad evolutiva ponderada biogeográficamente (i.e., una medida ponderada de abundancia que captura la proporción única del árbol filogenético que representa una especie) para diferentes sitios en la Región Florística del Cabo. La riqueza de especies y los valores de diversidad filogenética estuvieron altamente correlacionados en sitios de la región, pero la riqueza de especies se concentró en unos cuantos sitios que no representaron la distribución más extensa espacialmente de la diversidad filogenética. La diversidad evolutiva ponderada biogeográficamente produjo un esquema de priorización distinto de las otras 2 medidas y resaltó a los sitios sureños como prioridades de conservación. Los altos valores de diversidad evolutiva ponderada biogeográficamente en estos sitios fueron el resultado de una relación no aleatoria entre la unicidad evolutiva y la rareza geográfica, donde las especies raras también tendieron a presentar altos niveles de unicidad evolutiva. Tales especies únicas y raras son de particular preocupación, pero no son capturadas por los esquemas de conservación que solo enfocan la riqueza de especies o la diversidad filogenética.

Introducción: a lo largo de la historia se han desarrollado sistemas de conciencia que han permitido interpretar el entorno de una forma más acertada. En nuestra especie, dichos sistemas facilitaron que se dominara la materia y que se desarrollaran aspectos neurofisiológicos tan complejos que nos posibilitan preguntarnos sobre nuestro origen, fisiología y existencia.Materiales y métodos: se recolectaron datos de varias fuentes, de diversas bibliotecas, que incluyen neuroanatomía, psicología y etología, así como datos obtenidos de la geología, la paleontología y la arqueología que nos orientan para reconstruir la historia filogenética y relacionarla con los conocimientos actuales de neurología y psiquiatría.Resultados: en las especies, la aparición de sistemas complejos, como el sistema nervioso, expresa su mayor exponente en el sistema nervioso humano. Esto, a partir de estrategias evolutivas estables, ha abierto el camino para desarrollar sistemas de conciencia más sofisticados como el humano.Discusión: las diversas hipótesis que intentan explicar el origen de nuestro cerebro han revelado datos que permiten comprender e interpretar diferentes formas de conciencia, primitivas y complejas, que con gran dificultad permiten reconstruir dicho origen, desde diversos aspectos neurofisiológicos que nos llevan a intentar comprender la estructura misma de la psique, que parece desarrollarse funcional y filogenéticamente a partir de capas profundas hasta capas superficiales.Conclusiones: entendemos que la aparición del sistema nervioso y la conciencia tiene una historia, un proceso importante que entender para interpretar el origen de nuestro cerebro y su relación con la conciencia; sin embargo, aún quedan muchos interrogantes por interpretar.

The flora of the Guiana Shield contains several plant lineages that are restricted to white‐sand vegetation, some of which are widespread in tropical South America. Here, the history of diversification of one of these lineages, the genus Pagamea (Rubiaceae), is reconstructed through phylogenetic hypotheses. Data from chloroplast (rps16 and rpl20‐rps12) and nuclear (ITS) markers were incongruent, with ITS found to be more consistent with morphological criteria to delimit species. Reconstruction of the ancestral area for the genus was ambiguous, with both the western Guiana Shield and the Atlantic coastal areas containing early divergent lineages, but most speciation events appeared to have happened in the western Guiana Shield where most extant diversity is present. Dispersal events into the western Amazon and the Andes (1.5–4.5 Ma) and the eastern Guiana Shield (0.4–2.2 Ma) were followed by speciation events in these regions. Dispersal events between the Amazon and Atlantic rain forest occurred at least three times independently. However, dispersals into new areas were limited, and most regions were found to be phylogenetically clustered. Altitudinal and habitat shifts happened multiple times independently, but ecological traits were found to be phylogenetically conserved, implying that such shifts were not the cause of lineage divergence. The result that most speciation events happened in the western Guiana Shield, where white‐sand habitats predominate in both lowlands and highlands, and which has been less affected by Pleistocene climatic change, coupled with the result that ecological traits are phylogenetically conserved, suggests that the diversification of Pagamea may have been related primarily to the patchy distribution of white‐sand vegetation.

Anthropogenic habitat disturbance is a major threat to tropical forests and understanding the ecological consequences of this disturbance is crucial for the conservation of biodiversity. There have been many attempts to determine the ecological traits associated with bird species' vulnerability to disturbance, but no attempt has been made to synthesize these studies to show consensus. We analyzed data from 57 published studies (covering 1214 bird species) that investigated the response of tropical bird assemblages to moderate forest disturbance (e.g., selective logging). Our results show that the mean abundance of species from six commonly reported feeding guilds responded differently to disturbance and that species' ecological traits (body size, local population size, and geographic range size) and evolutionary relationships may influence responses in some guilds. Granivore abundance increased significantly and insectivore and frugivore abundance decreased significantly following disturbance. These general conclusions were robust to the effects of ecological traits and phylogeny. Responses of carnivores, nectarivores, and omnivores were less clear, but analyses that accounted for phylogeny indicated that these guilds declined following disturbance. In contrast to the other guilds, the reported responses of carnivores and nectarivores differed among regions (Asia vs. Neotropics) and were influenced by the sampling protocols used in different studies (e.g., time since disturbance), which may explain the difficulty in detecting general responses to disturbance in these guilds. Overall, general patterns governed the responses of species to habitat disturbance, and the differential responses of guilds suggested that disturbance affects trophic organization and thus ecosystem functioning.