Extant fruit-eating birds promote genetically diverse seed rain, but disperse to fewer sites in defaunated tropical forests

Autor(es)

Carvalho, Carolina da Silva ^{[1, 2]} ; Garcia, Cristina ^{[3, 4]} ; Lucas, Marilia Souza ^[1] ; Jordano, Pedro ^[5] ; Cortes, Marina Correa ^[1]

Afiliação do(s) autor(es)

^[1] Sao Paulo State Univ Unesp, Inst Biosci, Rio Claro - Brazil

^[2] Univ Fed Sao Carlos UFSCar, Dept Genet & Evolucao, Sao Carlos - Brazil

^[3] Univ Liverpool, Inst Integrat Biol, Dept Evolut Ecol & Behav, Liverpool, Merseyside - England

^[4] Univ Porto, Ctr Invest Biodiversidade & Recursos Genet CIBIO, Vairao - Portugal

^[5] Consejo Super Invest Cient EBD CSIC, Integrat Ecol Grp, Estn Biol Donana, Seville - Spain

• Tipo de documento: Artigo Científico
• Fonte: JOURNAL OF ECOLOGY; v. 109, n. 2, p. 1055-1067, FEB 2021.
• Citações Web of Science: 0

Resumo

The world-wide decline in populations of large-bodied vertebrates due to deforestation and poaching threatens the persistence of animal-dispersed plants by reducing long-distance seed dispersal and generating aggregated seed rain patterns. We evaluated whether the composition of maternal trees contributing to the seed rain is also impacted by the loss of large frugivores. By combining molecular tools with a thorough sampling of the frugivore-generated seed rain we quantified the number of seeds, richness of maternal progenies and number of maternal effective alleles in the seed rain of a tropical palm Euterpe edulis across ten Atlantic Forest remnants with varying levels of avian defaunation and density of palm conspecifics. Forest structure in defaunated areas was characterized by higher canopy openness. Defaunation did not affect the number of seeds dispersed or of effective alleles, but, together with palm density, was associated with higher numbers of maternal genotypes in the seed rain. This result suggests that medium-sized birds may play an important role in mixing maternal genotypes where large-sized frugivores have been extirpated. Defaunation, however, impacted the spatial distribution of seeds, with deposition sites in avian depauperated forests less likely to receive at least one seed. Synthesis. Our study suggests that medium-sized frugivores contribute to maintaining the quantitative component of seed dispersal and local genetic diversity of a threatened tropical palm in human degraded forests and, therefore, may be important for guaranteeing the persistence of remnant animal-dispersed plant populations under scenarios of rapid environmental change. The loss of large-bodied frugivores, however, can disrupt longer dispersal events and strengthen the dispersal spatial limitation, with consequences for plant spatial distribution and fine-scale genetic structure at the population level. (AU)

• Processo FAPESP: 16/22843-8 - Determinantes da dispersão de sementes e de genes de uma palmeira tropical através de paisagens fragmentadas e defaunadas
• Beneficiário: Carolina da Silva Carvalho
• Modalidade de apoio: Bolsas no Exterior - Estágio de Pesquisa - Doutorado
• Processo FAPESP: 19/03005-0 - US-IALE 2019 Annual Meeting
• Beneficiário: Marina Corrêa Côrtes
• Modalidade de apoio: Auxílio à Pesquisa - Reunião - Exterior
• Processo FAPESP: 14/01029-5 - Efeitos ecológicos e genéticos da variação do tamanho das sementes em paisagem defaunada
• Beneficiário: Carolina da Silva Carvalho
• Modalidade de apoio: Bolsas no Brasil - Doutorado
• Processo FAPESP: 19/26436-6 - Reavaliação das espécies de mamíferos que se acredita estar localmente extintos no Centro de Endemismo Pernambuco (CEP), a partir de DNA de amostras mistas e metabarcoding
• Beneficiário: Carolina da Silva Carvalho
• Modalidade de apoio: Bolsas no Brasil - Pós-Doutorado