Active research projects in the Termitology Lab focus on the following themes:
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Behavioural & Evolutionary Ecology
- Patterns of species coexistence within termite nests
- developed in partnership with Dr. Karsten Schönrogge, from the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (Wallingford, UK).
- developed in partnership with Dr. Jan Šobotník, from the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry (Prague, Czech Republic).
- developed in partnership wit Prof. Kat Shea, from the Department of Bioloy, Pennsylvania State University (University Park, PA, USA)
- developed in partnership with Dr. Elio Tuci, from the Computing Sciences Department, Aberystwyth University (Aberystwyth, Wales)
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Social behaviour
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Complex systems applied to the study of group effects, specially regarding effects of grouping in improving individual termite ability to circumvent natural (e.g. starvation) and non-natural (e.g. poisoning by insecticides) stresses.
- developed in partnership with Dr. Octavio Miramontes from the Interindividual Interactions Lab (UNAMéxico), and the Insecticide Toxicology Lab (UFViçosa).
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Software development
BioMa: a free software to manage data on biodiversity. BioMa is designed to meet the needs of Museums or individual scientific collections. BioMa's features include the simultaneous management of data from different research projects. This makes the software very useful for storing and manipulating field data collected independently by several people, e.g., several students running their own thesis.
BioMa is sponsored by Fapemig, the Minas Gerais State Foundation for Research Support, and is housed by SourceForge, the leading world repository of free software.
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- developed in partnership with the BioInformatics Lab (UFViçosa)