Effects of frugivore species pool and seed size on the diversity and functional composition of frugivores visiting fruiting trees

The relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in seed dispersal remains understudied despite its critical role in maintaining plant diversity in the tropics. Field studies on this relationship are often confounded by environmental and phylogenetic variations across species richness gradients. We examined how overall avian frugivore species richness at a site influenced the frugivore richness, visitation rates, and functional composition of two key effect traits⸺beak width and hand-wing index⸺on fruiting trees. Across six sites in tropical Asia, spanning a sevenfold gradient in frugivore species richness but with similar forest types and phylogenetically nested frugivore communities, we recorded 34,014 interactions between 134 avian frugivores and 131 plant species. Our results provide some support for the biodiversity-ecosystem functioning relationship, as higher overall frugivore species richness increased the number of frugivore species visiting individual fruiting t..., , # Data from: Effects of frugivore species pool and seed size on the diversity and functional composition of frugivores visiting fruiting trees

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.hqbzkh1vw](10.5061/dryad.hqbzkh1vw)

## Description of the data and file structure

The study was conducted across six sites spread across four biodiversity hotspots - Western Ghats-Sri Lanka, Eastern Himalaya, Indo-Myanmar, and Sundaland in south and south-east Asia. All the sites are tropical lowland evergreen rainforest sites below 1,200 m above sea level and receive more than 2,000 mm of annual rainfall (Fig. 1). All the sites are Protected Areas harbouring primary evergreen forests with minimal anthropogenic disturbance to fleshy-fruited plants and avian frugivores. These sites within the Oriental realm represent distinct biogeographic subunits, suggesting distinct biogeographic processes may have shaped the diversity of frugivore assemblages. The most species-poor site was the small, volcanic, oceanic island of ...,