Projects

Current projects

Reconciling phenotypic evolution with metacommunity theory

Ongoing · Aug 2024 – Jul 2027

Conciliando evolução fenotípica com o arcabouço teórico de metacomunidades: perspectivas para uma nova síntese

Funded by FUNDECT and CNPq through the Special Call Fundect/CNPq 15/2024 (Research Productivity fellowships; process 83/027.032/2024). The grant combines a 36-month research productivity fellowship (Fundect PQ-2, equivalent to CNPq PQ level E) with a research allowance for field work and consumables — BRL 75,600 in total.

The metacommunity framework explains species distributions through a handful of archetypes that combine environmental heterogeneity, dispersal and ecological equivalence. Rapid evolution of phenotypic traits, including in response to human-altered environments, appears to be common, yet its role is still poorly integrated into metacommunity theory. This project uses land-use gradients associated with urbanisation as a natural template to ask how phenotypic change feeds back into the dynamics of ecological communities.

Aims

  • Test how urbanisation reshapes the adaptive landscape of phenotypic traits that represent different dimensions of the niche.
  • Quantify the relative contribution of ecology and evolution to trait divergence.
  • Test how intra- and interspecific trait variation explain species distributions along urbanisation gradients in multiple landscapes.

Approach. Geometric morphometrics, phylogenetic comparative methods and inference of adaptive (fitness) landscapes, linking trait variation to the abundance, richness and distribution of species along environmental gradients — and asking how changes in the distribution of fitness in open populations scale up to metacommunity patterns.

What we expect. More urbanised environments should be more homogeneous and constrain trait variation; urban populations should also be more isolated, so that phenotypes fix faster under reduced gene flow — and, if those phenotypes have low fitness, populations would be maladapted and prone to local extinction. The results should help plan cities that work for both people and biodiversity, and contribute to a “metacommunity 2.0” that integrates phenotypic evolution with dispersal and niche selection.

FrogNet — acoustic monitoring of frogs

Ongoing

Principal investigator: Liliana Piatti. The lab participates as a collaborator.

FrogNet monitors frog vocalisations in the Pantanal and the Cerrado with passive acoustic recorders and BirdNET custom classifiers trained to recognise the calls of local species. Daiene L. Hokama Sousa’s PhD applies ecoacoustics and CNN-based species recognition to Pantanal frog metacommunities within this project.

The validation step — deciding whether a classifier’s detections can be trusted — is handled by the lab’s open BirdNET Validation Sampler.

Completed projects

Eco-evolutionary dynamics of urban biodiversity

Understanding human impacts to improve human–wildlife coexistence.

Project completed in March 2026. The CNPq Universal grant that funded this work has ended; papers stemming from it are still being written and submitted.

From March 2022 to March 2026 (originally until 2025, then extended) we ran a CNPq Universal grant (Proc 407318/2021-6) from the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Research (CNPq) to investigate how frogs are responding to urban ecosystems in terms of their phenotype. One Master’s, one PhD, and one undergraduate student conducting independent research collected data along urbanisation gradients in three Brazilian cities — both at the population and metacommunity scales. All of them presented their work at national and international conferences. Stay tuned for the papers coming out of this project!

Team

Fernando R. da Silva

Fernando R. da Silva

Co-PI · UFSCar

Franco Souza

Franco Souza

Co-PI · UFMS

Michel V. Garey

Michel V. Garey

Co-PI · UNILA

Andros T. Gianuca

Andros T. Gianuca

Co-PI · UFRN

Fabio Angeoletto

Co-PI · UFR

Humboldt sabbatical at iDiv (2024–2025)

Completed

Diogo spent 2024–2025 as an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow (Experienced Researchers) at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), Leipzig. Talks from the sabbatical — on urban ecology in the Global South and on the evolutionary macroecology of the Atlantic Forest — are on the Talks page.

Funding history

  • 2024–2027 — FUNDECT/CNPq research productivity grant (Call 15/2024). Reconciling phenotypic evolution with metacommunity theory; fellowship plus research allowance for field work conducted by lab students.
  • 2024–2025 — Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Research fellowship for experienced researchers and subsidy towards research costs for the sabbatical at iDiv.
  • 2022–2026 — CNPq Universal (Proc 407318/2021-6). Eco-evolutionary dynamics of urban biodiversity. Concluded March 2026.