Environmental management is one of the most important activities in ecological conservation at present. Faced with various socioeconomic impacts (e.g., urbanization, agriculture, and logging), practical and effective ways to analyze and determine how biodiversity is affected by these anthropogenic activities are essential.

Urbanization has considerable impacts on stream ecosystems. Streams in urban settings are affected by multiple stressors such as flow modifications and loss of riparian vegetation. The richness and abundance of aquatic insects, such as odonates, directly reflect these alterations and can be used to assess urban impacts on streams.

Inland sand areas scattered across the North American eastern deciduous forest and western tallgrass prairie ecotone are known for supporting pyrogenic early-successional vegetation and specially adapted terrestrial faunas. Many of these globally and regionally rare systems contain functionally connected wetland networks (“wetscapes”) potentially important for aquatic insects.

Our study evaluated the effects of environmental variables on the assemblages of the suborder Zygoptera, and tested the hypothesis that environmental variables are more important determinants of the structure of these assemblages than limnological variables in streams. We sampled 17 streams in the Carajás National Forest and tested our hypothesis using a linear regression analysis, with the zygopteran species composition, richness, and abundance as the response variables.

The Indian Elattoneura are a difficult group to identify due to their extreme morphological similarity and sparse information in identification keys and on geographical distribution. The ambiguity is prominent among two Peninsular Indian Elattoneura species, E. nigerrima (Laidlaw, 1917) and E. tetrica (Laidlaw, 1917), described a hundred years ago.

Many insects including odonates thermoregulate using a combination of behavioral and physiological mechanisms. At high ambient temperature (T_a), these mechanisms include decreased heat production and increased heat loss. Heat production can be reduced by decreasing activity. Heat loss can be enhanced by perching in a shaded microhabitat where temperature is cooler than in the surrounding environment.