Plant-animal antagonist interactions in fragmented habitats: a meta-analysis

MARIANA CHAVEZ PESQUEIRA; PILAR SUAREZ MONTES; JUAN NÚÑEZ FARFÁN; RAMIRO AGUILAR

Congreso; Annual Meeting Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation; 2013

Habitat fragmentation is considered as one of the greatest threats to global biodiversity. By producing isolation and distancing between habitat fragments and the continuous habitat, one of the most negative consequences of habitat fragmentation is the modification of the establishment and development of biotic interactions. For plants, many studies on the effect of habitat fragmentation over its antagonistic interactions with natural enemies have been reported, but with no clear pattern to date. By means of a meta-analysis we reviewed the existent literature about the effect of habitat fragmentation in plant populations that suffer damage from antagonists, such as folivory, seed predation, frugivory, florivory, damage by pathogens and gall-forming insects. We classified plant species in different categories such as natural habitat, life form, life stage and type of antagonist. We also considered the surrounding matrix of the fragments and time since fragmentation for every study, as well as different methodological approaches. Our results for 98 plant species of 54 families indicate that in fragmented habitats, plants suffer significantly less attacks from antagonists than plants in the undisturbed habitat, but this pattern is affected by the phylogenetic relationships of plants. When performing a phylogenethic-independent meta-analysis, the effect was lost. Thus, studies analyzing single species in fragmented habitats should consider the phylogenetic pattern to avoid biases when concluding about the effect of habitat fragmentation on biotic interactions between plants and antagonists.