Patterns of fruit production in tropical forests are shifting with negative outnumbering positive trends

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Authors

Andrew Hacket-Pain, Asenath Adienge, Michał Bogdziewicz, Emma R Bush, Hazel Chapman, Herve R Memiaghe, Bismark Ofosu-Bamfo, Akiko Satake, Valentin Journe

Abstract

The impacts of climate change and anthropogenic disturbance are increasingly evident in the structure and demographics of tropical forests, yet the response of tree reproduction remains poorly understood. As fruit and seed production is the first step in forest recruitment, this gap is critical to understanding tropical forest resilience. Tropical fruits are important in diets of numerous frugivores and are essential resources for local human communities, thus changes in fruit quantity and composition could have cascading effects on ecosystems and the people who depend on them. In this study, we demonstrate that forest fruit production is shifting across tropical sites, with negative species-level trends occurring four times more frequently than positive ones across a network of 17 sites. Nevertheless, trends in fruit production are diverse across sites. While major spatial and temporal gaps in data coverage remain, by leveraging the expanding network of long-term monitoring, collaborative research has the potential to identify current trends in tropical fruit production and their drivers. This will enable robust predictions of future trends and advance our understanding of tropical forest vulnerability to environmental change.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.32942/X2404C

Subjects

Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences

Keywords

plant reproduction, climate change, Plant demographics, seed production, Flower production, Food availability, Forest recruitment

Dates

Published: 2024-10-25 05:00

Last Updated: 2024-10-25 12:00

License

CC BY Attribution 4.0 International

Additional Metadata

Language:
English

Conflict of interest statement:
None

Data and Code Availability Statement:
Raw data can be found at https://github.com/JJFoest/MASTREEplus/