Using joint species movement modelling to infer the role of frugivory on structuring plant communities

MORÁN LÓPEZ, TERESA; ESPÍNDOLA, WALTER D.; CARLO, TOMÁS A.; MORALES, JUAN M.

Sain Andrews

Congreso; International Statistical Ecology Conference; 2018

University of Saint Andrews

The way frugivores move and which species they select to forage determines the compositionand spatial configuration of the seed rain, which may have long-standing consequences forplant communities. Usually, many species are involved in the seed dispersal of plants and itis important to characterize their behaviour. This is a challenge because often we do not havesufficient data on all the fruit-eating species in a local community. To overcome suchdifficulties, we combined the recently proposed joint species movement modelling framework(JSMM) with an agent based model. By means of JSMM we estimated frugivorous speciesdecision parameters integrating information at the community level. In particular, weassessed how the characteristics of frugivores affected their movement and foragingdecisions and quantified similarities due to phylogenetic relatedness. This approach allowedus to infer frugivorous decisions at the community-level in tropical and temperate forestcommunities. Subsequently, we used the fitted model to simulate bird movement andforaging in spatially-explicit landscapes. To evaluate the performance of our model, wecompared predicted values of plant-animal interactions, flight distances, and seed raincomposition to those of field data.Our results show that frugivores decide where to move based on travel costs and fruit reward(number of fruits and type). Movement decisions are modulated by species traits, mainly bodysize. In contrast, fruit choice does not seem to follow a consistent pattern among species and-in our model- was governed by species? phylogeny rather than traits. Finally, our work showsthat the role of frugivorous species in structuring the early regenerating community emergesfrom the interplay among mobility, fruit choice behaviour, and the composition of plantcommunities.