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

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 …

One of the most intriguing questions in ecology is how to identify which and how many
species will be able to inhabit human-modified landscapes. Large-bodied mammals …

“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 …

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

Hunting has reduced or eliminated large-bodied vertebrates in many areas across the
tropics, contributing to the global process of defaunation. Elucidating the ecological …

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

Using a decade-long exclosure experiment in Panama, we tested the hypothesis that
ground-dwelling vertebrate herbivores and seed predators are crucial determinants of …

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 …

Human activities have altered the abundance and distribution of animals, reshaping
ecosystems into novel and generally more depauperate configurations. Whereas …