A new method to simulate the hydrological state of soil under natural conditions

Micro, macro and mesofauna in the soil often respond to fluctuating environmental conditions, resulting in changes of abundance and community structure. Effects of changing soil parameters are normally determined with samples taken in the field and brought to the laboratory, i.e. where natural environmental conditions may not apply. We devised a method (STAFD - soil tubes for artificial flood and drought), which simulates the hydrological state of soil in situ using implanted cores. Control tubes were compared with treatment tubes in which floods of 15, 30, 60 and 90 days, and droughts of 60, 90 and 120 days were simulated in the field. Flooding and drought were found to reduce number of individuals in all soil faunal groups, but the response to drought was slower and not in proportion to the expected decrease of the water content. The results of the simulated floods in particular show the value of the STAFD method for the investigation of such extreme events in natural habitats.

Efficiency in inventories of ants in a forest reservein Central Amazonia

The objective of this work was to evaluate an inventory method efficiency for ants. We used subsamples collected in 24 transects of 100 m, distributed in 6 plots of 600 ha each in primary forest, as part of a long-term project. Ten litter subsamples were extracted per transect using Winkler extractors. Ants were identified to genus level, and Crematogaster, Gnamptogenys and Pachycondyla genera to species/morphospecies level. To evaluate the consequences of reduced sampling on the retention of ecological information, we estimated the lowest number of subsamples needed to detect the effects of environmental variables. Multidimensional scaling (MDS) was used to generate dissimilarity matrices, and Mantel correlations between each reduced-sampling effort and maximum effort were used as an index of how much information was maintained and could still be used in multivariate analyses. Lower p-values was observed on the effect of soil pH in the community of genera, and on the effect of the litter volume for the community of Crematogaster. The trend was still detectable in the analysis based on reduced-sampling. The number of subsamples can be reduced, and the cost-efficiency of the protocol can be improved with little loss of information.

Development of herbicide-tolerant irrigated rice cultivars

The objective of this work was to develop new irrigated rice lines tolerant to imidazolinone herbicides. The backcross breeding procedure was used to transfer the imidazolinone tolerance allele from mutant 93AS3510 to the recurrent parents 'BRS 7 Taim' and 'BRS Pelota'. Individual herbicide-tolerant plants were selected in each generation, for three backcrossings (RC1 to RC3), followed by three selfing generations (RC3F1 to RC3F3). The best four RC3F3 lines for agronomic traits were genotyped with 44 microsatellite markers. The observed conversion index of the new imidazolinone-tolerant lines varied from 91.86 to 97.67%. Pairwise genetic distance analysis between these lines and 22 accessions from the Embrapa's Rice Germplasm Bank clustered the new lines with their respective recurrent parents, but not with 'IRGA 417', which was originally used as recurrent parent to derive IRGA 422 CL, the only imidazolinone-tolerant irrigated rice cultivar recommended for cultivation in Brazil. Therefore, these lines represent new options of genetically diverse imidazolinone-tolerant rice accessions. Lines CNA10756 ('BRS Sinuelo CL') and CNA10757 will be released for cultivation in the Clearfield irrigated rice production system in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.