Defaunation, driven by hunting and habitat fragmentation, poses a threat to wildlife in
tropical forests worldwide and is expected to have cascading effects on other organisms …

Defaunation alters trophic interactions between plants and vertebrates, which may disrupt
trophic cascades, thereby favoring a subset of plant species and reducing diversity. If …

It has been suggested that tropical defaunation may unleash community-wide cascading
effects, leading to reductions in plant diversity. However, experimental evidence establishing …

Defaunation can trigger cascading events in natural communities and may have strong
consequences for plant recruitment in tropical forests. Several species of large seed …

“Empty forests” in which humans have driven large vertebrate species to extinction lack
myriad direct and indirect species interactions. This may alter key ecosystem processes …

Seed dispersal sets the stage for the suite of biotic and abiotic interactions that determine
the fate of individual seeds. In this review, we first focus on how dispersal influences the …

Unprecedented rates of logging and hunting threaten to transform the remaining primary
tropical forest into a degraded mosaic, emptied of wildlife. Defaunation is expected to …

The local, global or functional extinction of species or populations of animals, known as
defaunation, can erode important ecological services in tropical forests. Many mutualistic …

Overhunting reduces important plant-animal interactions such as vertebrate seed dispersal
and seed predation, thereby altering plant regeneration and even above-ground biomass. It …

Hunting and habitat loss represent an increasingly common anthropogenic impact.
Available evidence suggests that defaunation is typically differential: medium/large …