Obituary: André de Mendonça-Lima (1973–2015)

On August 18th 2015, the Brazilian society of Ornithology lost one of its most beloved and competent members: Andre de Mendonca-Lima. Andre (Dede) was born in Porto Alegre, on August 13th 1973. Since the age of 20 he attended the laboratory of Ornithology at the “Museu de Ciencias e Tecnologia da PUCRS”, under the guidance of ornithologist Carla Suertegaray Fontana, where he was the first PUCRS student to do an internship at the newly founded Laboratory. From an early age, he demonstrated excellent skills in bird identification out in the field, having a special interest in small and inconspicuous species, which did not go unnoticed to his “sharp-eye”. In Rio Grande do Sul, he collaborated on more than 30 field trips to study birds at the PUCRS Center for Research and Conservation of Nature – “CPCN Pro-Mata in Sao Francisco de Paula” also surveying birds in Porto Alegre – at the Country Club, in the “Morro do Osso” Park and throughout the city. Between 1999 and 2001, he was one of the young researchers who assisted in the study of the bird community of Porto Alegre, the object of Carla S. Fontana’s PhD. His graduate work was completed at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul-UFRGS, where he obtained a masters and PhD in ecology, working at the laboratory of Populations and Communities Ecology, coordinated by Prof. Sandra Maria Hartz, his supervisor. During his master’s degree, between 2000 and 2001, he was motivated to understand the cooccurrence of syntopic species, concentrating his studies on the behavioral aspects of birds in the Parulidae family. A by-product of this study, published with Graziele Volpato, was a proposal for a standardized nomenclature for bird’s foraging maneuvers in the Portuguese language, which is still widely used and made him nationally known on the ornithological stage. Later, during his doctorate, conducted between 2008 and 2011, he focused on silvicultural systems, motivated by the need to understand how the commercial areas of pine modify the diversity and behavior of birds in Araucaria forest Obituary: Andre de Mendonca-Lima (1973-2015)