PARENT SESSION
Organized Oral Session 30: Modeling movement at multiple scales
Organizer(s): J Fryxell, M Turner, and M Boyce
Wednesday, August 10, 8:00 AM - 11:30 AM, Meeting Room 511 C, Level 5, Palais des congrès de Montréal
Bird foraging behaviors scale up to predict corridor effects on seed dispersal.
Tewksbury, Joshua*,1, Haddad, Nick2, Levey, Doug3, Bolker, Ben3, Sargent, Sarah4, 1 Department of Biology, Seattle, WA, USA2 Department of Zoology, Raleigh, NC, USA3 Department of Zoology, Gainesville, FL, 981154 Department of Biology, Meadville, PA, USA
ABSTRACT- Habitat fragmentation threatens biodiversity by disrupting dispersal. Because organisms are difficult to track, the mechanistic basis and ecological impact of such disruption is controversial. We quantified the movement of avian seed dispersers across hundreds of meters in eight experimentally fragmented landscapes. A simulation model parameterized from these data accurately predicted the observed pattern of seed rain and revealed that habitat corridors increased avian seed dispersal between habitat patches by a surprising mechanism: birds followed edges in the matrix rather than dispersing within corridors. Our study demonstrates how models based on easily observed behavioral patterns can be scaled up to predict landscape-level processes.
Key words: Corridor, Edge, Seed Dispersal