Impacts on Neotropical Diversity: A Call for More Integrative Coastal Management

Highly diverse ecosystems can be found along the coastlines connected to the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, making the Neotropical region one of the global zones with the highest levels of biodiversity and endemism. Estuaries, beaches, coastal lagoons and coral reefs are closely connected, giving them a chain productivity that is critical to the balance of their components. As a result, this ecological connectivity also offers a variety of economically important resources exploited by the human population. Noted biodiversity and endemism indices have raised questions about how the maintenance of the diversity and productivity of the Neotropical region are related, and how they respond to local and global human impacts. The scientific community has drawn attention to the priority of planning and conservation of biological resources, mainly because neotropical coastal diversity is inserted in an anthropogenic environment, which includes disorderly occupation and disturbance to surrounding environments.

We aim for this Research Topic to provide a broad overview of how disturbances in the dynamics and variability of the physical, biological and chemical processes of Neotropical coastal ecosystems influence biodiversity and its functioning. In this context, the DNA barcoding approach has permitted important insights and considerable advances in the understanding of diversity, because it can provide an accurate molecular diagnosis of species, in particular, the identification of cryptic species and evidence of the existence of new species. Within a multidisciplinary framework, we encourage the submission of original articles and brief communications based on ecology, modeling, coastal management, spatiotemporal dynamics, climate change, phylogeographic, population and DNA barcoding studies. From the advances in knowledge of coastal Neotropical biodiversity, we hope that multiple perspectives will be drawn to identify and fill priority gaps in Neotropical conservation and to provide insights on the current status of Neotropical biodiversity.