Modeling the impact of wild harvest on plant–disperser mutualisms

Abstract Across the tropics, millions of rural families rely on non-timber forest products for protein, subsistence, and other financial or cultural uses. Often, communities exploit biotically dispersed trees their mammalian avian seed disperser. Empirical findings have indicated that many plant animal resources are overexploited, presenting challenges biodiversity conservation sustainable livelihoods. However, there has been limited research investigating impacts harvest targets both dispersers zoochoric trees. We formulated a discrete-time model interacting plants under harvest. found more dependent species will dictate threshold level harvest, higher levels dependence could drive pair to local extinction. illustrated application sensitivity analysis our modeling framework in order facilitate future analyses applications using this approach.