Deshpande, Purabi and Sharma, Rohan and Lehikoinen, Aleksi and Thorogood, Rose (2023) Native fauna interact differently with native and alien trees in a tropical megacity. Science of the Total Environment, 868.

[thumbnail of 1-s2.0-S004896972300298X-main.pdf] Text
1-s2.0-S004896972300298X-main.pdf - Published Version
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution.

Download (3MB)

Abstract

The negative effects of invasive alien plant species on natural ecosystems arewell known. However, in rapidly growing cities, alien plants can provide native fauna with resources otherwise lost due to the biotic homogenization, which is common to urban ecosystems. Interactions of native faunawith alien flora have thus far focused largely on invertebrate pollinators in temperate cities in the northern hemisphere. Cities in tropical areas, however, are larger and are growing more rapidly, and host a variety of vertebrate pollinators. Understanding how birds andmammals interact with native and alien flora in these megacities could improve management of urban ecosystems in highly biodiverse regions while limiting invasion potential. Therefore, here we investigate whether native diurnal birds and mammals interact differently with native versus alien trees in Bengaluru, India where historical planting has led to an abundance of alien tree species. We find that tree origin alone was not an important predictor for bird species richness and abundance, but taller native trees with large floral display sizes were more species rich than alien trees of similar floral displays. As expected from their shared evolutionary history, nectarivorous birds fed from native trees more often in a manner that could facilitate pollination, but engaged in nectar theft more often with alien trees. Squirrels (the mammal observed most frequently to interact with flowers) were more likely, however, to depredate flowers of native trees.Our results suggest alien trees can be an important resource for fauna in expanding urban areas, and that nectar
theft by birds could reduce the seed set of alien trees.

Item Type: Article
Additional Information: Copyright of this article belongs to the authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Uncontrolled Keywords: Alien species, Megacity, Pollination, Species interactions, Tropical ecology, Urban ecology, Vertebrate pollinators
Subjects: A ATREE Publications > G Journal Papers
Divisions: Academy for Conservation Science and Sustainable Studies > MSc Students Publications
Depositing User: Ms Library Staff
Date Deposited: 23 Dec 2025 08:38
Last Modified: 23 Dec 2025 08:38
URI: http://archives.atree.org/id/eprint/1405

Actions (login required)

View Item
View Item