Detailed studies of primates and fruiting trees have illustrated that these groups of organisms are involved in a very complex set of interactions, with primates relying on fruiting trees as important food resources and fruiting trees relying on frugivores for seed dispersal. Human activities that influence either primate seed dispersal or fruit production have the potential of having unanticip...

Most fleshy-fruited plants establish strong local interactions with a few fruit-eating species across their distribution range, which can differ among sites and have a major impact for the plant population dynamics. In turn, human disturbances alter both the original animal assemblage with which plants interact and the outcome of the mutualistic interaction. Negative consequences of human distu...

The importance of lianas through time and their effect on tree reproduction are evaluated for the first time in a Southeast Asian Dipterocarp forest. We quantified flower and seed production by lianas and trees for 13 years, assessed liana loads in the crowns of all trees larger than 30 cm in diameter at breast height (1.3 m) in 2002 and 2014, and assessed levels of reproduction for the same tr...

1 The role of seed limitation in tropical forests remains uncertain owing to the scarcity of experimental evidence. We performed seed addition experiments to assess seed limitation for 32 shade-tolerant tropical forest species and monitored the natural seed rain of 25 of these species for 17 years. 2 One, two or five seeds were sown into 0.0079-m 2 plots for large( n = 5 species), medium( n = 5...

THOUGH budding and grafting have been long used by horticulturists a a means of reproducing genetically complex or sterile clones superior for their fruit or ornamental value, little consideration has been given to these techniques by foresters as a means of improving the unit value of forest stands. Forest geneticists in Denmark and Sweden have, however, sensed the practical value of these tec...

1. Plant – animal interactions, and in particular the processes of seed predation and dispersal, are crucial for tree regeneration and forest dynamics. A novel and striking case of interaction between a dung beetle ( Thorectes lusitanicus ) and two Quercus species ( Q. suber and Q. canariensis ) in forests of southern Spain is presented here. 2. During the autumn, T. lusitanicus beetles (endemi...

The impacts of forest fragmentation on both reproductive biology and genetic diversity of native plant species is hardly understood, despite some studies have analyzed this current worldwide problem. Since this constitutes one of the main threats to seasonal semi-deciduous forests in Southeastern Brazil, we investigated the reproductive success and the genetic diversity of a distylous, understo...

Question: How does habitat degradation affect recruitment limitation and its components (seed limitation versus establishment limitation) of woody plant communities in a Mediterranean landscape? Location: 1600-1900m a.s.l. in the Sierra Nevada National Park, southern Spain. The landscape is a mosaic composed of native forest and two degraded landscape units: reforestation stands and shrubland. ...

The palm tree Euterpe edulis is endemic to the Atlantic Forest, where it constitutes an economically important forest product. The often unplanned and illegal harvesting of palm hearts has led to drastic reductions in the populations of E. edulis in many areas where this palm used to be the dominant understorey tree species. We investigated the effects of harvesting on seed and seedling predati...