José Vinícius Bernardy

The Amazon is crucial for global environmental balance, including climate regulation, yet deforestation and wildfires increasingly threaten human health. This scoping review aims to map and synthesize evidence on the human health impacts of deforestation and wildfires in the Amazon and to identify key knowledge gaps. Empirical studies linking deforestation or wildfires to human health outcomes in the Amazon, published up to December 2023, were eligible for inclusion. Comprehensive searches were conducted in Web of Science, Scopus, and PubMed, supplemented by reference backward citation tracking. Data were extracted and synthesized to categorize findings by study characteristics (e.g., geographic scope, methodology) and health outcomes. The review included 108 studies identifying 41 distinct health outcomes. Malaria was the most researched, in 43.5% of the studies, showing strong associations with forest loss, alongside leishmaniasis (American tegumentary leishmaniasis and visceral leishmaniasis), evaluated in 13.9% of them. Biomass burning was linked to respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, particularly in Brazil, and was associated with genotoxicity and mutagenicity. Land-use change is therefore a critical driver of public health vulnerability in the Amazon. There is an urgent need for integrative analytical models and multisectoral policies within the One Health framework to mitigate these complex impacts.

Anura, one of the most studied taxa regarding intersexual selection, has been considered a model for experiments on female preferences for decades. Despite this, there is still much to learn about most species and different topics. We describe the current state of knowledge on anuran intersexual selection (e.g., most studied taxa, themes, types of signals, and traits) through a scientometric review. Our survey identified and classified 521 studies published between 1975 and 2022, and a yearly publication rate of 10.85 articles. Most studies were classified into the research themes of mating preferences (314) or mating success (180), while only a few fit into selection analysis (52) or signal recognition (22). In studies on mating preferences, acoustic features were the most explored, especially the female’s preference for the dominant frequency (79). Even though a considerable diversity was embraced in our survey (203 species), we found that most efforts concentrate on a small set of species (nearly 40% of the records are about the 10 most studied species). Of those, Engystomops pustulosos (63) and Dryophytes versicolor (60) are by far the most studied. Considering the type of signal, acoustic communication was explored more often (292 studies) in comparison to visual (35), acoustic-visual (23), and chemical (2) signals. Our findings in this review point to a considerable bias in anuran intersexual selection studies regarding species, themes, and types of signals studied, which we discuss. We also make recommendations for future studies.