Trophic rewilding benefits a tropical community through direct and indirect network effects

Species reintroductions can be used as a conservation strategy to restore ecological interactions and the functionality of impoverished ecosystems. The ecological effects of reintroductions go beyond restoring pairwise interactions, because reintroductions can change how extant species are indirectly linked to each other in an ecological community. These indirect pathways, in turn, may shape a myriad of ecological and evolutionary processes operating in ecological systems. Here, we investigated how reintroductions may affect the direct and indirect pathways connecting species in ecological networks. We modeled the potential effects of the reintroduction of four frugivore species (channel-billed toucans, red-humped agoutis, brown howler monkeys and yellow-footed tortoises) to the local seed dispersal network in an Atlantic Forest site, the Tijuca National Park (Tijuca, Brazil). We used a seed dispersal interaction dataset together with data on species occurrences in Tijuca to build netwo...