Building bridges between environmental and political agendas is essential nowadays in face of the increasing human pressure on natural environments, including wetlands. Wetlands provide critical ecosystem services for humanity and can generate a considerable direct or indirect income to the local communities. To meet many of the sustainable development goals, we need to move our trajectory from the current environmental destructive development to a wiser wetland use. The current article contain a proposed agenda for the Pantanal aiming the improvement of public policy for conservation in the Pantanal, one of the largest, most diverse, and continuous inland wetland in the world. We suggest and discuss a list of 11 essential interfaces between science, policy, and development in region linked to the proposed agenda. We believe that a functional science network can booster the collaborative capability to generate creative ideas and solutions to address the big challenges faced by the Pantanal wetland.

Scattered trees are thought to be keystone structures for biodiversity in landscapes world‐wide. However, such trees have been largely neglected by researchers and their importance for biodiversity remains unclear. We completed a global meta‐analysis to quantify relationships between scattered trees and the species richness, abundance and composition of vertebrates, arthropods and plants. First, we tested whether areas near scattered trees support higher levels of species richness and abundance than nearby open areas. Second, we compared levels of species richness and abundance in matrix areas with scattered trees and areas embedded within nearby habitat patches. We also compared the composition of biological communities inhabiting habitat patches, open areas and areas with scattered trees. A total of 62 studies contained suitable data for our quantitative analyses. The local abundance of arthropods, vertebrates and woody plants was 60%–430% greater and overall species richness was 50%–100% higher in areas with scattered trees than in open areas. Conversely, for herbaceous plants, there was no consistent relationship between species abundance and the occurrence of scattered trees, although species richness was, on average, 43% lower. The abundance and richness of all taxonomic groups was similar in matrix areas supporting scattered trees and habitat patches, although the species richness of epiphytes was, on average, 50% higher in habitat patches. Communities inhabiting habitat patches were more similar in composition to the communities inhabiting areas with scattered trees, and less similar to the communities of open areas. Synthesis and applications. Areas with scattered trees support greater levels of biodiversity than open areas, as well as communities that are more similar to those inhabiting habitat patches. Scattered trees can be regarded as keystone structures for vertebrates, arthropods and terrestrial plants in landscapes world‐wide. The maintenance of scattered trees may be compatible with livestock grazing in some agricultural landscapes. Greater management effort and targeted, long‐term policies are needed to retain or re‐establish scattered trees in many farming landscapes in both forest and non‐forest biomes around the world.

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Data on species composition, richness, and density are presented for the leaf litter frog assemblage of an area of Atlantic Rainforest at the Serra dos Órgãos mountain range, in the state of Rio de Janeiro, southeastern Brazil. Three sampling methods were used: plot sampling, visual encounter surveys, and pitfall traps. The local assemblage of leaf litter frogs was composed of 16 species, with the direct-developing species, Euparkerella brasiliensis (Parker, 1926), being the most abundant. The estimated density of the local leaf litter frog assemblage based on plot sampling was 17.1 ind/100 m² and the estimated overall leaf litter frog mass was 684.2 g/ha. The estimated density of leaf litter frogs at the present study is the highest currently reported for Atlantic Rainforest areas, which reinforces the idea of higher densities of leaf litter frogs in the Neotropical Region compared to the Old World tropics

Several amphibian species have ecological traits that can make them vulnerable to landscape changes, such as habitat preference and reproductive strategies. We evaluated how anuran species and their respective reproductive modes were distributed in an Atlantic Forest fragmented landscape, Southeastern Brazil. We sampled through visual encounter surveys three continuous forest sites, 12 forest fragments and five pasture areas (matrix) between July 2007 and March 2010. We recorded 50 anuran species with 15 reproductive modes, a third of them (33.3%) recorded only in continuous forest sites (modes 3, 8, 19, 25 and 36). These reproductive modes found only in continuous forest sites are typically forest-associated, and seem to be more vulnerable to habitat loss. Additionally, we found a trend for larger fragments to harbor both higher number of types of reproductive sites and diversity of frog reproductive modes. Our findings suggests that fragment sizes can better predict the number of frog reproductive modes than the species richness in Atlantic Forest fragmented landscapes, and highlights the need to consider frog reproductive traits in future studies.Abstract in Portuguese is available in the online version of this article.

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