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

JUAN MANUEL MORALES; TERESA MORÁN LÓPEZ; TOMAS A. CARLO; WALTER ESPINDOLA

Saint Andrews

Congreso; International Statistical Ecology Conference; 2018

University of Saint Andrews

The way frugivores move and which species they select to forage determines the composition and spatial configuration of the seed rain, which may have long-standing consequences for plant communities. Usually, many species are involved in the seed dispersal of plants and it is important to characterize their behaviour. This is a challenge because often we do not have sufficient data on all the fruit-eating species in a local community. To overcome such difficulties, we combined the recently proposed joint species movement modelling framework (JSMM) with an agent based model. By means of JSMM we estimated frugivorous species decision parameters integrating information at the community level. In particular, we assessed how the characteristics of frugivores affected their movement and foraging decisions and quantified similarities due to phylogenetic relatedness. This approach allowed us to infer frugivorous decisions at the community-level in tropical and temperate forest communities. Subsequently, we used the fitted model to simulate bird movement and foraging in spatially-explicit landscapes. To evaluate the performance of our model, we compared predicted values of plant-animal interactions, flight distances, and seed rain composition 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 body size. 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 shows that the role of frugivorous species in structuring the early regenerating community emerges from the interplay among mobility, fruit choice behaviour, and the composition of plant communities.