Deforestation Simplifies Understory Bird Seed-Dispersal Networks in Human-Modified Landscapes (original) (raw)

Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution

Abstract

Global biodiversity is threatened by land-use changes through human activities. This is mainly due to the conversion of continuous forests into forest fragments surrounded by anthropogenic matrices. In general, sensitive species are lost while species adapted to disturbances succeed in altered environments. However, whether the interactions performed by the persisting species are also modified, and how it scales up to the network level throughout the landscape are virtually unknown in most tropical hotspots of biodiversity. Here we evaluated how landscape predictors (forest cover, total core area, edge density, inter-patch isolation) and local characteristics (fruit availability, vegetation complexity) affected understory birds seed-dispersal networks in 19 forest fragments along the hyperdiverse but highly depauperate northeast distribution of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. Also, our sampled sites were distributed in two regions with contrasting land cover changes. We used mist net...

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