CAREER: Community Reassembly in Restored Tropical Forests

Virginia Polytechnic Institute And State University, Blacksburg VA

Investigators

Abstract

The project will answer questions about how the types and number of trees planted during forest restoration affect the recovery of plants and animals. Restoration is important for biodiversity and ensuring that humans have equal access to natural resources. This project will focus on restoration of tropical trees. Many tropical trees have edible fruit that are moved around by animals such as birds, bats, and monkeys. This movement of fruit and the seeds within them is a critical process that can affect tree diversity. This project will look at fruit characteristics and animal behavior to determine the best methods for restoration. The project will also provide student research and training opportunities in environmental science and restoration. This project uses an experimental forest restoration landscape to test the central hypotheses that the functional traits, diversity, and spatial structure of early-establishing vegetation strongly influence the assembly of local fruit-frugivore networks, and through them, seed dispersal and tree establishment. The experimental landscape has independent manipulations of early-establishing tree composition (to produce variable fruit availability for seed-dispersing animals), tree diversity, and spatial arrangement (tree planting patch density) at a large spatial scale that allows studies of animal-mediated seed dispersal. The research will also test a novel DNA metabarcoding approach to better resolve tree species composition from diverse seed rain collections. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.