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Abstract Animal trait data are scattered across several datasets, making it challenging to compile and compare trait information across different groups. For plants, the TRY database has been an unwavering success for those ecologists interested in addressing how plant traits influence a wide variety of processes and patterns, but the same is not true for most animal taxonomic groups. Here, we introduce ZooTraits, a Shiny app designed to help users explore and obtain animal trait data for research in ecology and evolution. ZooTraits was developed to tackle the challenge of finding in a single site information of multiple trait datasets and facilitating access to traits by providing an easy‐to‐use, open‐source platform. This app combines datasets centralized in the Open Trait Network, raw data from the AnimalTraits database, and trait information for animals compiled by Gonçalves‐Souza et al. (2023, Ecology and Evolution 13, e10016). Importantly, the ZooTraits app can be accessed freely and provides a user‐friendly interface through three functionalities that will allow users to easily visualize, compare, download, and upload trait data across the animal tree of life—ExploreTrait, FeedTrait, and GetTrait. By using ExploreTrait and GetTrait, users can explore, compare, and extract 3954 trait records from 23,394 species centralized in the Open Traits Network, and trait data for ~2000 species from the AnimalTraits database. The app summarizes trait information for numerous taxonomic groups within the Animal Kingdom, encompassing data from diverse aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems and various geographic regions worldwide. Moreover, ZooTraits enables researchers to upload trait information, serving as a hub for a continually expanding global trait database. By promoting the centralization of trait datasets and offering a platform for data sharing, ZooTraits is facilitating advancements in trait‐based ecological and evolutionary studies. We hope that other trait databases will evolve to mirror the approach we have outlined here.

Disturbances are key events in ecological systems, strongly impacting biological communities. This study disentangles the effects of a chronic (flood) and acute (fire) disturbance to determine their interactive effects on ant species richness and composition at different temporal scales. For this, we sampled ground-dwelling ants with pitfall traps on native grasslands in the Pantanal wetland, one of the world's largest floodplains. We sampled ants ten days (short-term), one year (medium-term), and four years (long-term) after fire and at varying elevations (a surrogate for the time that these areas remain flooded). We found that fire was the dominant factor in determining ant community patterns in flooded areas. In the short-term, fire substantially changed species composition and increased species richness. However, these effects decreased at one year and disappeared after four years, demonstrating the ant community’s resilience. Elevation and, consequently, flooding, did not influence any measured parameter, indicating that the ant species are adapted to colonize other areas rapidly or survive in such flooded habitats. Our results suggest that Pantanal ant communities can recover from acute fire disturbances after some years. However, increasing fire frequency caused by global climatic changes and recent Brazilian environmental policy misconducts would probably compromise the observed resilience.

One of the core challenges of functional diversity is the identification of traits that can accurately be linked to ecological processes. Trait-based metrics have been used to detect and quantify the effects of deterministic processes, such as niche filtering and co-occurrence mechanisms. However, most functional studies have simplified the measured attributes, especially for fish species. Here, we aimed to test the influence of trait resolution and surrogates on the accuracy in expressing resource partitioning among tropical fish species. We assessed pairwise species similarity between distinct ways of express resource use by species (through increasing trait resolution), and tested whether differences in resolutions are strong enough to provide different patterns in the functional structure of tropical fish assemblages. Our study shows that distinct ways of expressing resource partitioning among species may provide different ecological interpretations of this process as different resolutions or surrogates can change pairwise species, similarity.

ABSTRACT The development of effective monitoring tools depends on finding sensitive metrics that are capable of detecting the most important environmental impacts at a given region. We assessed if metrics derived from stream fish assemblages reflect physical habitat degradation and changes in land cover. We sampled the ichthyofauna and environmental characteristics of 16 stream sites of first and second order in the Upper Tocantins River basin. The streams were classified according to their environmental characteristics into reference (n = 5), intermediate (n = 4), and impacted (n = 7). A total of 4,079 individuals in five orders, 12 families, and 30 species were collected. Of the 20 metrics tested, eight were non-collinear and were tested for their performance in discriminating among groups of streams. Three metrics were sensitive to the gradient of degradation: Berger-Parker dominance index, percentage of characiform fish, and percentage of rheophilic individuals. Some commonly used metrics did not reflect the disturbances and many others were redundant with those that did. These results indicate that the metrics derived from fish assemblages may be informative for identifying the conservation status of streams, with the potential to be used in biomonitoring.

Pimelodella taenioptera Miranda Ribeiro, 1914 and Imparfinis schubarti (Gomes, 1956) are two of the most common fish species in Bodoquena Plateau streams, Paraguay basin. These species have benthic habits and subaquatical observations suggested that they present differentiation in their preference for mesohabitat types. Pimelodella taenioptera shows preference for slow waters, such as pools, while I. schubarti is associated to riffles. In this study we investigated if the known patterns of mesohabitat use of P. taenioptera and I. schubarti can be predict by their ecomorphological and trophic traits. We described the dietary habits and ecomorphological attributes of P. taenioptera and I. schubarti individuals, captured in the Parque Nacional da Serra da Bodoquena (PNSB), Mato Grosso do Sul state, central Brazil. Pimelodella taenioptera presented a more generalist diet, consuming a total of 23 different food items. Imparfinis schubarti have a diet based exclusively on aquatic insects. The ecomorphological analysis revealed that the species differed in relation to five morphological traits associated to habitat use (p

We tested whether habitat, identity, size of nuclear fishes, and intensity of bottom disturbance caused by their foraging can predict the composition of fish followers in nuclear-follower feeding associations. The study was carried out in a stream of the Serra da Bodoquena, Mato Grosso do Sul State, Southwestern Brazil. We performed underwater observational sessions (total 12 h) of such interspecific interactions to obtain data about the identity and abundance of the followers in the association, as well as the identity and size of the nuclear fish. We also evaluated whether different intensities of bottom disturbance due to the nuclear fish foraging and type of habitat may influence interactions. We recorded 38 episodes involving nuclear and follower species. Using a multivariate analysis with distance matrices, we noted that the intensity of bottom disturbance caused by nuclear fishes was the main predictor of the composition of the follower species (r = 0.55, p < 0.01), as well as the identity of the nuclear species, although this latter relation was weak (r = 0.09, p = 0.05). Such results indicate that followers react readily to sediment suspension, which reflects the trophic plasticity and opportunistic foraging characteristic of most tropical freshwater fishes.

ABSTRACT Roads affect biodiversity by increasing mortality rates, habitat loss, and natural landscape fragmentation. Poorly installed culverts can impound streams, changing the environmental conditions, and affecting aquatic communities. We evaluated the effects of road crossings on the taxonomic composition and functional structure of fish assemblages in lowland eastern Amazonian streams, Brazil. We tested the hypothesis that the presence of road-derived impoundments affects assemblage taxonomic and functional composition and structure. Two predictions were addressed: (1) Species and functional group composition will differ in impounded reaches in relation to lotic reaches; (2) Assemblages in downstream lotic reaches will be richer in species and functional groups in relation to upstream lotic and impoundment reaches. We sampled five streams crossed by roads presenting impoundment formation, conducted by visual census (day, dusk, and night) in 200 m line transects. Assemblage composition from lentic reaches was different from lotic reaches, and Shannon diversity from downstream reaches was different from upstream and impoundment, however, beta diversity partitioning between lotic reaches showed higher nestedness contribution, reinforcing the role of impoundment in limiting fish dispersal between lotic reaches. These results suggest that impoundments impose environmental and dispersal constraints to fish, affecting their longitudinal distribution in streams fragmented by roads.