401: Using plant and frugivore traits to understand biodiversity across scales and inform conservation

Presenter(s)

Hazel Anderson

Abstract or Description

Global changes like climate change and habitat destruction are threatening species and causing declines in biodiversity. The Neotropical region is predicted to be an area of particularly high risk of extinction and is home to 37% of the world's known plant species. To conserve biodiversity and identify biodiversity hotspot locations, we need to know where biodiversity is highest and most threatened. Plants are essential to ecosystem functioning and understanding their patterns of biodiversity can help identify regions for conservation for numerous species relying on them. Unfortunately, we lack information on plant biodiversity patterns as well as their respective conservation statuses. Knowing how certain plants and their traits are distributed in relation to animals that eat fruits (frugivores) and their traits could help quantify spatial distributions of biotic interactions and map patterns of biodiversity. Most conservation decisions are made based on a simple metric of species richness, but multiple dimensions of diversity should be used to quantify biodiversity as it creates a more holistic picture. This study used already existing big datasets of species occurrence records and functional traits to determine where are the spatial patterns of taxonomic and functional diversity most correlated between plant and frugivore species in the Neotropical country of Ecuador? Quantifying these relationships is important because multiple dimensions of biodiversity can be more comprehensive in identifying conservation priorities.