Fruits and frugivores of the Brazilian Cerrado: ecological and phylogenetic considerations

Abstract

Knowing the morphological and phylogenetic patterns of fruits of a plant community may elucidate plant-frugivore interactions, and analysis of dispersal syndromes is a practical approach to understanding these mutualisms. We investigated diff erent zoochorous fruits and frugivorous animals among Cerrado formations (forest, savanna and grassland), mapped dispersal syndromes on a Cerrado angiosperm phylogeny and tested for phylogenetic signal. For a core region in Cerrado, we found that, among almost a thousand fruit species and 258 fruit-eating vertebrates, 60% of the fruits had an ornithochorous syndrome and that 70% of the frugivores were birds. Most fruit and frugivorous species (~80%) inhabit forest formations, but many of them also occurred in more than one Cerrado formation. Th e zoochorous syndromes were found to have little phylogenetic signal, with many plant families exhibiting more than one fruit syndrome, and with ornithochory being widely distributed throughout the phylogeny. Our results suggest that plant-frugivore interactions tend to be evolutionarily labile in this Neotropical region, although birds have had a prominent role in fruit evolution. Furthermore, we found that all three Cerrado formations seem to be interrelated in maintaining functional stability of the plant-frugivore mutualisms in the Cerrado biome.

Phylogenetic community structure reveals differences in plant community assembly of an oligotrophic white-sand ecosystem from the Brazilian Atlantic Forest

“…Positive LifeFormNRI values show that there is a tendency of related species to resemble each other more than species drawn at random from the phylogeny, indicating that close relatives share more functional traits and show higher niche overlap than expected by chance. Similar patterns from other savannalike formations have been detected by previous studies (i.e., Qian & Zhang 2014;Moro et al 2015;Kuhlmann & Ribeiro 2016). …”

Phylogenetic structure is determined by patch size in rock outcrop vegetation on an inselberg in the northern Amazon region

“…Assuming that functional traits and ecological niches are conserved in evolutionary lineages, as indicated by the phylogenetic signal found in many similar studies (e.g., Moro et al 2015;Kuhlmann and Ribeiro, 2016), our finding of phylogenetic clustering is consistent with habitat filtering in inselbergs, although it would be necessary to measure the effect of environmental filtering due to abiotic stress factors. Accordingly, to explain this phylogenetic pattern, it would be more compelling to evaluate the relative proportion of the drivers that determine community structure in the different patch sizes.…”

Knowledge gaps regarding frugivorous ecological networks between birds and plants in Brazil

“…Bello et al (2017) reported 232 species of frugivorous birds for the Atlantic Forest from 166 published and unpublished papers. Kuhlmann & Ribeiro (2016) reported 182 species of frugivorous birds for the Cerrado. Similarly, there are 788 plant species whose fruits are consumed by more than 300 vertebrates in the Atlantic Forest (Bello et al, 2017), and 945 plants with zoochoric dispersion in the Cerrado (Kuhlmann & Ribeiro, 2016).…”

“…Kuhlmann & Ribeiro (2016) reported 182 species of frugivorous birds for the Cerrado. Similarly, there are 788 plant species whose fruits are consumed by more than 300 vertebrates in the Atlantic Forest (Bello et al, 2017), and 945 plants with zoochoric dispersion in the Cerrado (Kuhlmann & Ribeiro, 2016). Thus, the present bibliometric analysis recorded 20.13% of the birds and 1.03% of the plants of the Cerrado, and 20.06% of the birds and 1.9% of the plants of the Atlantic Forest (Costa, 2010).…”