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Full-Text Articles in Animal Sciences
Nestedness And Modularity Of Avian Metacommunities Across Gradients Of Chesapeake Bay Island Characteristics, Grant Walter Bowers
Nestedness And Modularity Of Avian Metacommunities Across Gradients Of Chesapeake Bay Island Characteristics, Grant Walter Bowers
Biological Sciences Theses & Dissertations
Islands are not only great models for understanding the ways in which communities are linked by the dispersal of their members to form metacommunities, but are of particular interest to conservationists. One important aspect of metacommunity structure is the degree of nestedness—whether or not less speciose communities are perfect subsets of more speciose communities. Another important metric of metacommunity structure is modularity—the degree to which communities belong to modules composed of other communities that share the same species but have little species overlap with communities from different modules. Environmental gradients have received insufficient attention as predictors of metacommunity nestedness and …
Temporal Dynamics And Seed Dispersal In Plant-Frugivore Communities Of The Dominican Republic, Spencer Christian Schubert
Temporal Dynamics And Seed Dispersal In Plant-Frugivore Communities Of The Dominican Republic, Spencer Christian Schubert
Biological Sciences Theses & Dissertations
Plant-animal mutualisms are a foundational component of biodiversity in terrestrial ecosystems. Most tropical forest plants have adapted to produce fleshy fruits to attract frugivorous animals to disperse seeds. Interaction patterns among plant taxa and their seed dispersers are driven by a complex suite of factors involving their evolutionary history and environmental context, and the structure of these mutualistic networks are theoretically tied to their ecological function. I carried out a series of field studies to investigate the temporal dynamics of mutualistic interactions of plant and avian frugivore communities in the central Dominican Republic and how their characteristics affect seed dispersal …