ANNOUNCEMENTS
Tropical rainforests have undergone fragmentation on a large scale due to increasing change in land use patterns. Vast areas of these forests have been converted to plantations. Forest-to-plantation conversions brings compositional variation which causes alteration in fruit-frugivore interactions, their community and richness as resource availability modifies. In the Western Ghats region, plantations of coffee, tea and eucalyptus have been part of these conversions. Shade - coffee plantations that sustain native trees are viewed as suitable habitats for wildlife and thus exploration of its ecological value becomes essential. The present study aims at understanding the effects of conversion of rainforest to coffee plantations on fruit-frugivore interactions via analysing the fruit resources, frugivore visitation patterns and their abundance in a tropical rainforest and coffee plantation land use. The fruit resources were measured in terms of fruit richness and availability which were higher on forest trails as compared to coffee. The composition of frugivores visiting fruiting trees was significantly different between the two land uses (p<0.05). The visitation rates and diversity of effective frugivores on fruiting trees were recorded to be higher in coffee (p<0.05) and were negatively associated with seed size and positively associated with fruit crop size in a significant manner. Mean (and SE) encounter rates of forest specialist frugivores were lower in coffee but encounter rates of open habitat generalist frugivores were higher suggesting, presence of more widespread species than persistence of specialists. Long-term studies are required to systematically record and understand overall fruit-frugivore communities present across these land uses and to assess the conservation value of coffee plantation systems.
Key words: Fruit-frugivore interactions, tropical ecology, Forest-to-coffee conversion, Fruit resource availability, Community composition.
