Shifts in community structure of tropical trees and avian frugivores in forests recovering from past logging

Abstract

Most of our current understanding of the impacts of hunting and logging on seed dispersal and plant recruitment is from the Neotropics [9,10,21,22,23], while there are very few studies from Asia [12,24,25]. Most studies have focused on studying one or few stages of the seed dispersal cycle [26] either during the fruit removal stage [9,10,22,27] or on comparisons of recruitment across hunted and control treatments [12,28,29,30]. ... ... Scatter dispersal of seeds as has been documented in this study is mediated by frugivores through fruit removal. While studies have documented reduced frugivore visitation, especially large-bodied frugivores in sites experiencing anthropogenic disturbances [9,22,24], estimates of seed arrival of scatter-dispersed seeds have been rarely quantified. In Namdapha, we consistently found positive relationships between hornbill abundance and net seed arrival of four large-seeded plants across two years [44]. ... ... In such a scenario, differences in estimates of net seed arrival in heavily and less disturbed site, are likely to be conservative. Forests experiencing anthropogenic threats like hunting and logging demonstrate shifts in recruit communities with greater representation of abiotically dispersed species as compared to biotically dispersed species [24,29]. We found that disturbed forests experience lowered recruitment of two large-seeded species Beilschmiedia assamica and Dysoxylum sp.