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Bird‐made fruit orchards in northern Europe: nestedness and network properties
Author(s) -
Lázaro Amparo,
Mark Susanne,
Olesen Jens M.
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
oikos
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.672
H-Index - 179
eISSN - 1600-0706
pISSN - 0030-1299
DOI - 10.1111/j.0030-1299.2005.13500.x
Subject(s) - nestedness , frugivore , biology , ecology , habitat , biological dispersal , seed dispersal , null model , temperate climate , species distribution , temperate forest , population , demography , sociology
Frugivorous birds are involved in the distribution of fleshy‐fruited plants. In a temperate forest in northern Europe, we investigated how fruit‐eating birds and habitat variation affect the local distribution of these plants and what the consequences are to the species composition of the fruit‐bearing plant community. We subdivided the forest into 25×25 quadrates and mapped the distribution of all fleshy‐fruited plant species (18 species) expected to have their seeds dispersed by birds. Our specific aims were (i) to test if the distribution of the fleshy‐fruited species in the forest was clumped, (ii) nested, and (iii) to describe the set of species as an interacting network. Our results show that bird‐dispersed fleshy‐fruited species in a temperate forest constitute a set of orchards with a strong spatial structure. The distributions of species were highly correlated and nested. We suggest that factors involved in dispersal and colonization are mainly responsible of a nested structure, where rare species are only found together with more widespread species and species‐poor sites only contain widespread species. Besides, the community had small‐world topology with high clustering and short path length between species. This makes the network robust against random perturbations.