Birds optimize fruit size consumed near their geographic range limits.

Animals can adjust their diet to maximize energy or nutritional intake. For example, birds often target fruits that match their beak size because those fruits can be consumed more efficiently. We hypothesized that pressure to optimize diet-measured as matching between fruit and beak size-increases under stressful environments, such as those that determine species' range edges.

Negative density dependence characterizes mutualistic interactions between birds and fruiting plants across latitudes.

Negative density dependence (NDD) in biotic interactions of interference such as plant-plant competition, granivory and herbivory are well-documented mechanisms that promote species' coexistence in diverse plant communities worldwide. Here, we investigated the generality of a novel type of NDD mechanism that operates through the mutualistic interactions of frugivory and seed dispersal among fruit-eating birds and plants. By sampling community-wide frugivory interactions at high spatial and temporal resolution in Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, Peru, Brazil and Argentina, we evaluated whether interaction frequencies between birds and fruit resources occurred more often (selection), as expected, or below expectations (under-utilization) set by the relative fruit abundance of the fruit resources of each plant species.

MelastomaTRAITs 1.0: A database of functional traits in Melastomataceae, a large pantropical angiosperm family.

The recent availability of open-access repositories of functional traits has revolutionized trait-based approaches in ecology and evolution. Nevertheless, the underrepresentation of tropical regions and lineages remains a pervasive bias in plant functional trait databases, which constrains large-scale assessments of plant ecology, evolution, and biogeography. Here, we present MelastomaTRAITs 1.

Global and regional ecological boundaries explain abrupt spatial discontinuities in avian frugivory interactions.

Species interactions can propagate disturbances across space via direct and indirect effects, potentially connecting species at a global scale. However, ecological and biogeographic boundaries may mitigate this spread by demarcating the limits of ecological networks. We tested whether large-scale ecological boundaries (ecoregions and biomes) and human disturbance gradients increase dissimilarity among plant-frugivore networks, while accounting for background spatial and elevational gradients and differences in network sampling.

ATLANTIC ANTS: a data set of ants in Atlantic Forests of South America.

Ants, an ecologically successful and numerically dominant group of animals, play key ecological roles as soil engineers, predators, nutrient recyclers, and regulators of plant growth and reproduction in most terrestrial ecosystems. Further, ants are widely used as bioindicators of the ecological impact of land use. We gathered information of ant species in the Atlantic Forest of South America.

Frugivory Specialization in Birds and Fruit Chemistry Structure Mutualistic Networks across the Neotropics.

AbstractThe interaction between fruit chemistry and the physiological traits of frugivores is expected to shape the structure of mutualistic seed dispersal networks, but it has been understudied compared with the role of morphological trait matching in structuring interaction patterns. For instance, highly frugivorous birds (i.e.

Can network metrics predict vulnerability and species roles in bird-dispersed plant communities? Not without behaviour.

Network metrics are widely used to infer the roles of mutualistic animals in plant communities and to predict the effect of species' loss. However, their empirical validation is scarce. Here we parameterized a joint species model of frugivory and seed dispersal with bird movement and foraging data from tropical and temperate communities.

Defaunation precipitates the extinction of evolutionarily distinct interactions in the Anthropocene.

Species on Earth are interconnected with each other through ecological interactions. Defaunation can erode those connections, yet we lack evolutionary predictions about the consequences of losing interactions in human-modified ecosystems. We quantified the fate of the evolutionary history of avian-seed dispersal interactions across tropical forest fragments by combining the evolutionary distinctness of the pairwise-partner species, a proxy to their unique functional features.

Breeding latitude predicts timing but not rate of spring migration in a widespread migratory bird in South America.

Identifying the processes that determine avian migratory strategies in different environmental contexts is imperative to understanding the constraints to survival and reproduction faced by migratory birds across the planet.We compared the spring migration strategies of Fork-tailed Flycatchers () that breed at south-temperate latitudes (i.e.

ATLANTIC EPIPHYTES: a data set of vascular and non-vascular epiphyte plants and lichens from the Atlantic Forest.

Epiphytes are hyper-diverse and one of the frequently undervalued life forms in plant surveys and biodiversity inventories. Epiphytes of the Atlantic Forest, one of the most endangered ecosystems in the world, have high endemism and radiated recently in the Pliocene. We aimed to (1) compile an extensive Atlantic Forest data set on vascular, non-vascular plants (including hemiepiphytes), and lichen epiphyte species occurrence and abundance; (2) describe the epiphyte distribution in the Atlantic Forest, in order to indicate future sampling efforts.

Joint species movement modeling: how do traits influence movements?

Joint species distribution modeling has enabled researchers to move from species-level to community-level analyses, leading to statistically more efficient and ecologically more informative use of data. Here, we propose joint species movement modeling (JSMM) as an analogous approach that enables inferring both species- and community-level movement parameters from multispecies movement data. The species-level movement parameters are modeled as a function of species traits and phylogenetic relationships, allowing one to ask how species traits influence movements, and whether phylogenetically related species are similar in their movement behavior.

Seed-dispersal interactions in fragmented landscapes - a metanetwork approach.

Mutualistic interactions repeatedly preserved across fragmented landscapes can scale-up to form a spatial metanetwork describing the distribution of interactions across patches. We explored the structure of a bird seed-dispersal (BSD) metanetwork in 16 Neotropical forest fragments to test whether a distinct subset of BSD-interactions may mediate landscape functional connectivity. The metanetwork is interaction-rich, modular and poorly connected, showing high beta-diversity and turnover of species and interactions.

ATLANTIC BIRDS: a data set of bird species from the Brazilian Atlantic Forest.

South America holds 30% of the world's avifauna, with the Atlantic Forest representing one of the richest regions of the Neotropics. Here we have compiled a data set on Brazilian Atlantic Forest bird occurrence (150,423) and abundance samples (N = 832 bird species; 33,119 bird individuals) using multiple methods, including qualitative surveys, mist nets, point counts, and line transects). We used four main sources of data: museum collections, on-line databases, literature sources, and unpublished reports.

Atlantic frugivory: a plant-frugivore interaction data set for the Atlantic Forest.

The data set provided here includes 8,320 frugivory interactions (records of pairwise interactions between plant and frugivore species) reported for the Atlantic Forest. The data set includes interactions between 331 vertebrate species (232 birds, 90 mammals, 5 fishes, 1 amphibian, and 3 reptiles) and 788 plant species. We also present information on traits directly related to the frugivory process (endozoochory), such as the size of fruits and seeds and the body mass and gape size of frugivores.

Trade-Offs in Male Display Activity with Lek Size.

In lek mating systems, males aggregate and defend arenas where they display for females; females select and mate with a male and then solely raise their offspring. Generally, female visits and copulations increase and reproductive variance in male mating success declines with lek size. Here we investigate how male display effort changes across a gradient in lek size.

Drivers of Spatial Variation in the Role of Ants as Secondary Seed Dispersers.

The spatial variation in the outcome of the interaction between secondary dispersers and seeds is superimposed upon the variation produced by primary dispersers. Investigating the factors that drive the outcome of the interactions with secondary seed dispersers thus represents an essential refinement to our understanding of the complete seed dispersal process. We studied the interactions between two ponerine ants (Pachycondyla striata Smith, 1858 and Odontomachus chelifer (Latreille, 1802)) with fruits experimentally set on the ground, and estimated the effects of ants on seedling establishment in three areas distributed along a 2-km stretch of a Brazilian Atlantic rainforest that differ in soil properties and vegetation physiognomies.

Defaunation affects carbon storage in tropical forests.

Carbon storage is widely acknowledged as one of the most valuable forest ecosystem services. Deforestation, logging, fragmentation, fire, and climate change have significant effects on tropical carbon stocks; however, an elusive and yet undetected decrease in carbon storage may be due to defaunation of large seed dispersers. Many large tropical trees with sizeable contributions to carbon stock rely on large vertebrates for seed dispersal and regeneration, however many of these frugivores are threatened by hunting, illegal trade, and habitat loss.

Reconstructing past ecological networks: the reconfiguration of seed-dispersal interactions after megafaunal extinction.

The late Quaternary megafaunal extinction impacted ecological communities worldwide, and affected key ecological processes such as seed dispersal. The traits of several species of large-seeded plants are thought to have evolved in response to interactions with extinct megafauna, but how these extinctions affected the organization of interactions in seed-dispersal systems is poorly understood. Here, we combined ecological and paleontological data and network analyses to investigate how the structure of a species-rich seed-dispersal network could have changed from the Pleistocene to the present and examine the possible consequences of such changes.

The dimensionality of ecological networks.

How many dimensions (trait-axes) are required to predict whether two species interact? This unanswered question originated with the idea of ecological niches, and yet bears relevance today for understanding what determines network structure. Here, we analyse a set of 200 ecological networks, including food webs, antagonistic and mutualistic networks, and find that the number of dimensions needed to completely explain all interactions is small ( < 10), with model selection favouring less than five. Using 18 high-quality webs including several species traits, we identify which traits contribute the most to explaining network structure.