BEGIN seminar – Adam Fell, PhD candidate at the University of Stirling
Date: 21 September 2021
Time: 15:00-16:00
Venue: The link for the event will be sent on the morning of the 21th to those that RSVP
Please RSVP at [email protected] until Mon 20th of June to receive the link.
All welcome!
Navigating fragmented tropical landscapes: understanding how forest fragmentation affects frugivore behaviour
Movement is essential for all organisms, whether it be passive or active, or across local, regional, or global scales. Movement underpins almost all aspects of an animal’s lifecycle, from the acquisition of food, mate choice, reproduction, and is intrinsically linked to broader ecosystem processes such as seed dispersal. Frugivorous animals move seeds from the parent plant to the site of germination. We can leverage recent technological advances in animal tracking to better understand frugivore movement and seed dispersal.
The purpose of this study is to provide a unique, comprehensive review and synthesis of the existing primary literature of tracking studies that use either GPS or radio telemetry to monitor movement of frugivorous animals on a global scale. We aim to provide a historical overview of the evolution and expansion of tagging technology. Specifically, we also evaluate the quality and quantity of data collected through the use of different tracking methods, and how this has changed over time. Furthermore, we assess the seed dispersal distances of frugivorous animals and assess which species and environmental traits best predict seed dispersal distances.
We provide both a quantitative and narrative synthesis of all current published literature that focus on the movement of frugivorous animals using tracking devices. We provide a comprehensive description of the study focus, the species of interest, the tracking method used, and the amount of data collected. We collated the mean and maximum seed dispersal distances of species from all seed dispersal studies.
A total of 148 peer-reviewed research studies were reviewed across a 42-year period. Of these, 62 studies focussed on seed dispersal and estimated dispersal distances. Our data illustrates that there has been a shift in tracking methods over time; with increased use of GPS tags post 2005, and especially for larger animals. GPS units have the potential to collect more data over longer periods. We found that seed dispersal distances increased significantly with body mass and ability to fly.
We suggests ways in which future movement studies can be standardised to help aid analysis and future replications, for example reporting all raw movement data and remaining consistent with keywords. These results also emphasise the importance of understanding the movement patterns of frugivorous animals to characterise seed dispersal distances. Seed dispersal is essential for the effective regeneration of many plant species and improved understanding of frugivore movement can help us understand patterns of plant regeneration at the landscape scale.
Biography
I have a special interest in understanding how animals are responding to an ever-changing world. And in particular, their behavioural responses to habitat changes. My previous research has seen me study the social interactions and behaviour of orphaned chimpanzees in Uganda to assess the likelihood of these individuals forming a troop hierarchy similar to their wild counterparts. For my master’s thesis, I explored how the foraging ecology of the red-tailed tropicbird in Mauritius is affected by changes in climate and assessed their energetic costs during prey encounters using onboard accelerometers. The ongoing development of tracking technology is another interest of mine and is something which I think will continue to help advance our understanding of animal behaviour. For my PhD project, I will be focusing on understanding how forest fragmentation affects bird behaviour in the tropical landscapes of Panama. Currently very little is known about how birds disperse and shift movement patterns with regards to habitat fragmentation. Something which seems pretty vital to understand, given that large populations of humans depend solely on ecosystem services produced by tropical forest species e.g. seed dispersal and pollination. Therefore, this project will aim to track multiple frugivorous bird species with state of the art GPS loggers to better understand their movement patterns across a deforested landscape gradient. We predict that species life-history and morphological traits will interact with landscape composition to determine dispersal among the different habitats. This information can then be used to assess the seed dispersal potential of frugivorous birds and the likelihood of deforested landscapes undergoing regeneration through natural succession.
