As tropical regions are converted to agriculture, conservation of biodiversity will depend not only on the maintenance of protected forest areas, but also on the scope for conservation within the agricultural matrix in which they are embedded. Tree cover typically retained in agricultural landscapes in the neotropics may provide resources and habitats for animals, but little is known about the extent to which it contributes to conservation of animal species. Here, we explore the animal diversity associated with different forms of tree cover for birds, bats, butterflies, and dung beetles in a pastoral landscape in Nicaragua. We measured species richness and abundance of these four animal taxa in riparian and secondary forest, forest fallows, live fences, and pastures with high and low tree cover. We recorded over 20,000 individuals of 189 species including 14 endangered bird species. Mean abundance and species richness of birds and bats, but not dung beetles or butterflies, were significantly different among forms of tree cover. Species richness of bats and birds was positively correlated with tree species richness. While the greatest numbers of bird species were associated with riparian and secondary forest, forest fallows, and pastures with >15% tree cover, the greatest numbers of bat species were found in live fences and riparian forest. Species assemblages of all animal taxa were different among tree cover types, so that maintaining a diversity of forms of tree cover led to conservation of more animal species in the landscape as a whole. Overall, the findings indicate that retaining tree cover within agricultural landscapes can help conserve animal diversity, but that conservation efforts need to target forms of tree cover that conserve the taxa that are of interest locally. Preventing the degradation of remaining forest fragments is a priority, but encouraging farmers to maintain tree cover in pastures and along boundaries may also make an important contribution to animal conservation.

Reconstructive treatments for jaw defects are complex procedures that can combine multiple techniques including fibula free flap (FFF) grafting. The purpose of this retrospective study was to document and share our experience on mandibular and maxillar reconstruction with FFF followed by secondary dental rehabilitation using implant insertion.We reviewed 198 patients treated by FFF grafting for mandibular and/or maxillary defects in our department during the past 11 years (1996-2007). A selection of 30 patients (18 males and 12 females, mean age of 46 y) with adequate criteria (hygiene, motivation, and prognosis) received secondary placement of osseointegrated implants. The implant success was clinically and radiographically evaluated.A total of 105 osseointegrated implants were placed in the grafted fibulas 5 months to 3 years after the reconstruction surgery. Only 4 implants were lost because of peri-implantitis (3 patients) and fibular fracture (1 patient); this corresponds to a 96.2% implant success rate.During the mean follow-up of 76 months, patient's satisfaction and functional and aesthetic results were evaluated. Radiologic findings indicated a low crest resorption around the implants despite an unfavorable crown-to-root ratio.The main difficulties in the reconstructions were lack of FFF height, absence of a vestibular groove, limitation of mouth opening, skin paddle thickness, and the reconstruction of surrounding tissues including the lip. Our management strategy is discussed.Prosthetic choice is fundamental to achieving patient-specific solutions. The prostheses used included sealed or screwed bridge, resin-bonded bridge, tooled bar, implant-borne denture, or implant-stabilized dentures. Dental implants may be used even in situations involving an unfavorable crown-to-root ratio and implant position by using milled bar and overdenture. The FFF provides a consistent bone graft that allows a reliable and predictable restoration with dental implants, leading to a satisfactory functional and aesthetic restoration.

Rapid degradation of tropical forests urges to improve our efficiency in large‐scale biodiversity assessment. DNA barcoding can assist greatly in this task, but commonly used phenetic approaches for DNA‐based identifications rely on the existence of comprehensive reference databases, which are infeasible for hyperdiverse tropical ecosystems. Alternatively, phylogenetic methods are more robust to sparse taxon sampling but time‐consuming, while multiple alignment of species‐diagnostic, typically length‐variable, markers can be problematic across divergent taxa. We advocate the combination of phylogenetic and phenetic methods for taxonomic assignment of DNA‐barcode sequences against incomplete reference databases such as GenBank, and we developed a pipeline to implement this approach on large‐scale plant diversity projects. The pipeline workflow includes several steps: database construction and curation, query sequence clustering, sequence retrieval, distance calculation, multiple alignment and phylogenetic inference. We describe the strategies used to establish these steps and the optimization of parameters to fit the selected psbA‐trnH marker. We tested the pipeline using infertile plant samples and herbivore diet sequences from the highly threatened Nicaraguan seasonally dry forest and exploiting a valuable purpose‐built resource: a partial local reference database of plant psbA‐trnH. The selected methodology proved efficient and reliable for high‐throughput taxonomic assignment, and our results corroborate the advantage of applying ‘strict’ tree‐based criteria to avoid false positives. The pipeline tools are distributed as the scripts suite ‘BAGpipe’ (pipeline for Biodiversity Assessment using GenBank data), which can be readily adjusted to the purposes of other projects and applied to sequence‐based identification for any marker or taxon.

El Volcán Casitas ubicado en Chinandega, Nicaragua, ha sido declarado recientemente, una reserva natural por la riqueza de la flora y fauna que subsiste en sus laderas. Dentro de la riqueza faunística se encuentran 79 especies de mariposas conocidas en la actualidad y de las cuales se presenta, en este trabajo, una lista que contiene la distribución general de cada especie, la planta hospedadora de las larvas y otros lugares de Nicaragua donde también se ha colectado esa misma especie de mariposa.

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