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cje ›› 2011, Vol. 30 ›› Issue (11): 2613-2620.

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Influence of habitat fragmentation on frugivores and their seed dispersal.

BAI Bing, LI Ning, LU Chang-hu**   

  1. College of Forest Resources and Environment, Nanjing Forestry University, Nanjing 210037, China
  • Online:2011-11-08 Published:2011-11-08

Abstract: Frugivores and the plants depending on frugivore to disperse their seeds form a mutualism in the process of evolution, but habitat fragmentation can disturb the process and break the mutualism. Habitat fragmentation often reduces the diversity of frugivores, but this situation does not happen in all ecosystems. Frugivores have different adaptability to the habitat fragmentation, being stronger for the forest generalists and food generalists. Habitat fragmentation has negative effects on most of the plants depending on frugivore to disperse their seeds, but some plants are not, and even, benefited. The seed dispersal effectiveness of the frugviores in fragmental habitat is the combined effect of seed dispersal amount, dispersal distance, seed germination, and establishment of seedling population. The changes in the foraging behavior and food choice of frugivores affect the seed dispersal amount, whereas the heterogeneity of habitat patch and the changes in food resource availability determine the seed dispersal distance. The successful establishment of seedling population depends on effective disperser. Three issues to be further studied were proposed: (1) how habitat fragmentation affects the seed dispersal and the relationship between animals and plants, especially how the spatial distribution of heterogeneous landscapes affects the seed dispersal effectiveness of frugivores, (2) how to create a new mutualism between plants and frugivores in habitat fragmentation, and (3) how the plant invasion induced by habitat fragmentation affects the seed dispersal of native plants.

Key words: GIS, Mathematic model, Forest land, Wood productiveness, Solar energy use efficiency