This poster was presented on the 6th Climate and Health symposium
Authors: Yuri Souza & Amy Zanne
This poster represent the fist part of my project that I aim to carry out during the summer break. I presented these ideas on the 6th Climate and Health symposium of the University of Miami in 2023. I also created a Storytelling using ArcGIS that you can interact with the maps and get some more details about our research, you can access it by clicking here
Termites are considered important ecosystem engineers and drivers of patterns and processes observed in savannas and tropical forests worldwide. Even recognizing their importance for ecosystem functioning and balance, we lack fundamental information (such as the species composition) about these invertebrates in the Brazilian Savanna, which constrains us in advance of robust and proper measurements of their importance in such an important and unique ecosystem. Therefore, we aim to survey and sample termites in the Chapada dos Veadeiros National Park (CVNP), a heterogeneous savanna comprising different guilds of termites and their structures, such as mounds and earthmounds. This park has areas ranging from flatted grasslands and forests to high mountain rocks, in which the seasonality and the shallow soil might turn the landscape into a mix of wet and dry ecosystems. The first part of my project will focus on identifying termites’ species composition, abundance, and distribution across this gradient of different areas of CVNP. In the second part, we propose to enlighten the underlying processes of termites’ role in soil biogeochemistry patterns using the environmental and local scale gradients, from nest-mounds and earthmounds to surrounding fields. For the first part, we will collect termites using survey protocols, such as linear transect and baits. The second part compares termites’ activity as drivers of soil nutrient composition, organic matter, moisture, soil structure, and carbon dioxide and methane gas flux. We hypothesize that the soil dynamic will vary according to termite composition over the CVNP. Thus, places with more termite activity would have richer nutrient soils and more atmospheric gas flux.
Unfortunately, our poster size is too large, so can not load it in a high resolution on this post. Please click here to access it from my GitHub and check more details of our research.
If you see mistakes or want to suggest changes, please create an issue on the source repository.
Text and figures are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 4.0. Source code is available at https://github.com/souzayuri/souzayuri.github.io, unless otherwise noted. The figures that have been reused from other sources don't fall under this license and can be recognized by a note in their caption: "Figure from ...".