Master's Research

INVESTIGATING THE SCALE-DEPENDENT RELATIONSHIPS OF PLANT-FRUGIVORE 

BIODIVERSITY USING BIG DATA IN A BIODIVERSITY HOTSPOT

Plants are vital to all life on Earth, and many are experiencing extinction risk and other threats, which makes it important to understand plant diversity. Investigating the biodiversity patterns of interacting species can help us gain knowledge of the underlying processes of biodiversity patterns. Quantifying spatial patterns of biodiversity plays a critical role in determining conservation priorities and ecosystem function and clarifying the underlying processes of community assembly, species-area relationships, and environmental filtering. There is a lack of knowledge about how taxonomic diversity and functional diversity covary across spatial grains, and between interacting species like fruiting plants and frugivorous birds and mammals. This work investigates spatial grain-dependent relationships of taxonomic diversity and functional diversity in the Tropical Andes forests at various spatial grains. The results provide evidence that relationships for both fruiting plant-frugivore taxonomic and functional diversity were the strongest at the coarsest spatial grain (100 km), the fruiting plant-frugivore taxonomic diversity relationship was stronger than the functional diversity relationship across all spatial grains, and the scaling relationship for fruiting plant-frugivore taxonomic diversity was stronger than fruiting plant-frugivore functional diversity. These findings support the expectation that the relationship between plant-frugivore taxonomic diversity and plant-frugivore functional diversity are scale-dependent and differ from each other. Future work should further assess these relationships by incorporating different traits, frugivore diet portion,  generalist vs. specialist plant-frugivore interactions, intraspecific trait variation, and environmental drivers including spatiotemporal changes in land use, land cover, and climate.