Across the world old-growth forests are rapidly diminishing due to anthropogenic forest conversion. Simultaneously, forest recovery in human-modified landscapes has led to an increase of secondary forests, which may have the potential to mitigate loss of biodiversity and provide important ecosystem services. Human impacts regulate both tree and animal abundances, but in a different way, so that in restored fragments novel communities (in terms of plant-animal interactions) are likely to develop.

Important landscape characteristics such as surrounding land-use and surrounding native forest cover are likely to greatly affect the composition and functioning of these novel communities, by altering the influx of frugivorous animals, tree seeds and genotypes from neighboring forests. This project addresses the complex interactions between plants and animals that enable ecosystem functioning and the provisioning of ecosystem services including carbon sequestration. 

We will quantify to what extent landscape connectivity affects restoration outcomes in terms of functional plant-frugivore relationships and cascading effects on carbon storage, population-level tree recruitment and genetic diversity and biodiversity conservation value in novel communities in the São Paulo Atlantic forest region. Based on our findings, we will identify priority areas within the Atlantic forest region that are most suitable for natural regeneration, and develop restoration guidelines to promote plant-frugivore interactions that enhance biodiversity and carbon sequestration where needed.