About this Research Topic
While the spatial locations of adult plants are fixed, their fruiting phenologies are highly variable, resulting in changes in fruiting synchrony among neighbouring plants. Thus, spatial patterns of fruit availability change both within seasons and across years, altering the ranks of individual trees with respect to dispersal outcomes within a season and across years. This raises a number of questions about the relationship between fruiting seasonality, frugivore abundance, frequency and distribution of frugivory events, and frugivore and plant traits.. This research topic “Timely insights on fruit-frugivore interactions” aims to bring together research articles and reviews examining the effects of temporal dynamics of fruit-frugivore interactions and seed dispersal processes at different temporal scales, and their implications for dispersal and recruitment within populations and communities, including questions outlined below:
a. What factors influence temporal aggregation or synchronization/segregation of fruit availability within-seasons in plants species having a high degree of overlap in frugivore assemblages?
b. What conditions favor the evolution of fruiting season length? What is the relative role of frugivore-plant interactions and abiotic environmental factors?
c. Do plant or frugivore traits influence inter-annual fluctuations in fruiting?
d. What are the consequences of the temporal changes in spatial aggregation on seed dispersal outcomes, rates of spread and plant demography?
e. Can climate change decouple fruit-frugivore interactions, and alter seed dispersal rates?
f. What are the influences of altered seed dispersal rates on plant demography under climate change?
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