We performed Ecological Niche Models (ENMs) to generate climatically suitable areas for anurans in the Brazilian hotspots, the Atlantic Forest (AF), and Cerrado (CER), considering the baseline and future climate change scenarios, to evaluate the differences in the alpha and beta diversity metrics across time. We surveyed anuran occurrence records and generated ENMs for 350 and 155 species in the AF and CER. The final predictive maps for the baseline, 2050, and 2070 climate scenarios, based on an ensemble approach, were used to estimate the alpha (local species richness) and beta diversity metrics (local contribution to beta diversity index and its decomposition into replacement and nestedness components) in each ~50 × 50 km grid cell of the hotspots. Climate change is not expected to drastically change the distribution of the anuran richness gradients, but to negatively impact their whole extensions (i.e., cause species losses throughout the hotspots), except the northeastern CER that is expected to gain in species richness. Areas having high beta diversity are expected to decrease in northeastern CER, whereas an increase is expected in southeastern/southwestern CER under climate change. High beta diversity areas are expected to remain in the same AF locations as the prediction of the baseline climate, but the predominance of species loss under climate change is expected to increase the nestedness component in the hotspot. These results suggest that the lack of similar climatically suitable areas for most species will be the main challenge that species will face in the future. Finally, the application of the present framework to a wide range of taxa is an important step for the conservation of threatened biomes.

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The mining activity is highly environmental impacting, being the excavation process and waste sterile rejects crowding the main pollution sources. The Santa Catarina Coal Basin has great importance, considering that contains 4.3 billions tons of coal (13% of the Brazilian reserve) and 6.400 hectares of degraded area. That way, the study objective was to characterize and identify the ambient impacts derivated from coal mining activities, at the Sideropolis city, SC. The base method used to evaluate was The Leopold matrix which adaptations were made according to a qualitative attribute weighting matrix to verify the significance of impacts. The interaction between two actions of the enterprise and 11 generated environmental impacts was analysed according to the attributes of frequency, extension, duration, direction and degree, both in the physical and anthropic environments. All impacts had a negative direction, where the most striking activity was the opening of the cava, which, when forming the acidic lagoon, changes the surface water quality, being described as of great importance. Therefore, recognizing the principal environment problems could help on strategies to accomplish the recovery requirements of degraded areas on this area.

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The utility of open-access biodiversity information in representing anurans in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest and Cerrado. Many geographic coordinates of species are only available in biological collections, and sometimes it is difficult to access these data. However, recent initiatives promise to compile and organize such biodiversity data at a global scale. We evaluated the effectiveness of open-access biodiversity information for forecasting the occurrence of anurans in two Brazilian hotspots -the Atlantic Forest (AF) and the Cerrado (CER). We compiled all available point-occurrence records for anuran species in both hotspots and identified the regions in each of the two hotspots having the highest and lowest number of anuran occurrences based on information from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and the SpeciesLink project. A total of 13,130 point-occurrence records were recovered for 409 anurans from the AF (~77% of the known species) and 12,729 records for 176 species (~85% of the known species) from the CER. Density of point occurrence data is not randomly distributed within the hotspots. The greatest density of Atlantic Forest records is in southeastern Brazil, and the densest areas in Cerrado occur in the transitional zones to the Atlantic Forest. Comparison of these results with previous studies based on traditional museum information revealed that many important collections of anurans from these hotspots are not included in GBIF and SpeciesLink.