40 documents found, page 1 of 4

A Review on the State of the Art in Frugivory and Seed Dispersal on Islands and...

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. Using fruit-consumption and trait ...

Assessing the Role of Lizards as Potential Pollinators of an Insular Plant Comm...

The role of lizards as potential pollinators on islands has been documented for either one or a few plants in different parts of the world, but it has never been assessed for an entire plant community. Here, we quantified interaction rate by lizards and evaluated intraspecific differences in the use of flowers on Cabrera Gran (Cabrera archipelago, Balearic Islands) by means of visual observations, automated cam...

Collective and harmonized high throughput barcoding of insular arthropod biodiv...

ABSTRACT: Current understanding of ecological and evolutionary processes underlying island biodiversity is heavily shaped by empirical data from plants and birds, although arthropods comprise the overwhelming majority of known animal species, and as such can provide key insights into processes governing biodiversity. Novel high throughput sequencing (HTS) approaches are now emerging as powerful tools to overcom...

Tripartite networks show that keystone species can multitask

Keystone species are disproportionately important for ecosystem functioning. While all species engage in multiple interaction types with other species, keystone species importance is often defined based on a single dimension of their Eltonian niche, that is, one type of interaction (e.g. keystone predator). It remains unclear whether the importance of keystone species is unidimensional or if it extends across i...

Tripartite networks show that keystone species can multitask

1. Keystone species are disproportionately important for ecosystem functioning. While all species engage in multiple interaction types with other species, keystone species importance is often defined based on a single dimension of their Eltonian niche, that is, one type of interaction (e.g. keystone predator). It remains unclear whether the importance of keystone species is unidimensional or if it extends acros...

Global and regional ecological boundaries explain abrupt spatial discontinuitie...

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-fru...

Ecological network complexity scales with area

Made available in DSpace on 2022-04-28T19:49:35Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2022-01-01; Larger geographical areas contain more species—an observation raised to a law in ecology. Less explored is whether biodiversity changes are accompanied by a modification of interaction networks. We use data from 32 spatial interaction networks from different ecosystems to analyse how network structure c...

Limited potential for bird migration to disperse plants to cooler latitudes

Climate change is forcing the redistribution of life on Earth at an unprecedented velocity1,2 . Migratory birds are thought to help plants to track climate change through long-distance seed dispersal3,4 . However, seeds may be consistently dispersed towards cooler or warmer latitudes depending on whether the fruiting period of a plant species coincides with northward or southward migrations. Here we assess the ...

Macaronesia as a Fruitful Arena for Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation Biology

Research in Macaronesia has led to substantial advances in ecology, evolution and conservation biology. We review the scientific developments achieved in this region, and outline promising research avenues enhancing conservation. Some of these discoveries indicate that the Macaronesian flora and fauna are composed of rather young lineages, not Tertiary relicts, predominantly of European origin. Macaronesia also...