Research web

The project "Biota de Orthoptera do Brasil" initiative brings together researchers from five research institutions (UFV, UNESP, UFPel, UFRB, PUCRS) to study the diversity of crickets, grasshoppers, and grasshoppers. Thus, the Brazilian Orthoptera Research Network was created, which comprises practically all Brazilian Orthoptera scholars. This group has been meeting bi-annually since 2006 on the "First Orthoptera Symposium" held during the XXI Brazilian Congress of Entomology. With the formation of the Research Network, there was the unification and integration of scientific efforts, previously isolated, to minimize the significant lack of studies and researchers of this group of organisms in the Brazilian territory.

The Orthoptera do Brasil Biota seeks to promote and expand the knowledge of the biodiversity of Orthoptera do Brasil, covering all its different biomes. The Research Network aims to provide tools for biological conservation and, in addition, to associate research with the training of human resources and actions of environmental education and dissemination of scientific knowledge. The proposal to associate research with extension and environmental education emphasizes the socio-environmental bias of a permanent nature. People feel subjects in the interrelationship with the biotic environment, redefining concepts and meanings that were not understood before regarding their environment—reducing the distance between them. Extension and environmental education actions aim to contact and know biodiversity and its relationship with the environment in the cognitive and emotional universe of the general public, favoring empathy, respect, and preservation. We aim to overcome the abstract or unattainable vision of scientific knowledge and transform it into everyday and personal knowledge.

In scientific terms, we aim to increase knowledge about the biodiversity of Orthoptera in Brazil, carrying out collections in locations and biomes that are under-sampled or not studied in terms of their orthopterofauna. In addition, our proposal encompasses the study of intra- and interpopulation genetic diversity. Through molecular, morphological, and ultramorphological tools. In addition to the study of patterns and processes that determine the biodiversity of Orthoptera, involving the mapping of local diversity (alpha), regional (range), and between habitats (beta), about Brazilian biomes and their areas of endemism. The various research and extension projects addressed by researchers in this Network are summarized in three major Research Programs:

(1) Systematics and Biogeography of Orthoptera,

(2) Orthoptera Ecology,

(3) Molecular (BarCodes) in Orthoptera.