No abstract

Vegetation stability, resilience and regeneration can be achieved by various ecological processes, the most important of which is seed dispersion. Among animal groups, birds have the largest number of frugivorous species in the Neotropics. The aim of this study was to conduct a bibliometric analysis to detect general patterns and discover knowledge gaps in order to identify future directions for research into bird frugivory in Brazil. A gap analysis was carried out by obtaining 77 articles published online and evaluating their data in different ways. The results revealed that research on bird frugivory in Brazil was published in 33 scientific journals and financed by 18 national and international funding agencies. The number of publications increased over time, with the majority of them reporting research carried out in biomes of Central-West and South regions of Brazil. The most important bird species in frugivorous interactions in the most studied biomes were identified, including some non-native species. Our results corroborate several other studies, which together demonstrate a lack research on frugivorous interactions in the North and Northeast of Brazil, where there are very important biomes for conservation, such as the Amazon and Caatinga, for which knowledge of seed dispersal processes is needed.

No abstract

Frugivory is a plant-animal mutualistic interaction carried out mostly by birds. It consists in the bird consumption of fruits with later dispersion of the plants' seeds, helping in the vegetation regeneration. Frugivory can be affected by the habitat fragmentation and introduction of exotic species, which may alter the species interaction by extinction or competitor introduction. This study aimed to compare the structure of the network of frugivorous interactions between birds and plants in native forest and eucalyptus plantation. Birds were captured by mist nets and had their feces collected. Later, the seeds were identified in laboratory. The records of fruit consumption by birds in the zoochoric plant species present in the study area were also conducted. The data collected was used to build a network of interactions and identify the most important network metrics, species, and ecological functional groups in the studied environments. The results showed that the species composition, the connectivity of the relationships, the importance of the species for the interaction networks and the number of subgroups within the networks were highly similar between the native forest and the eucalyptus plantation. This could be explained by the favorable conditions that the studied eucalyptus plantations presented, such as the lack of anthropogenic activities, well-developed understory, and the presence of native surrounding vegetation, allowing practically the same seed dispersal capacity in both types of environments.