Patterns of fruit production in tropical forests are shifting with negative outnumbering positive trends

This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 3 of this Preprint. You must log in to post a comment. There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 3 of this Preprint. Add a Comment You must log in to post a comment. Comments There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. The impacts of climate change and anthropogenic disturbance are increasingly evident in the structure and demographics of tropical forests, yet the response of tree reproduction remains poorly understood. As fruit and seed production is a key step in forest recruitment, this gap is critical to understanding tropical forest resilience. Tropical fruits are important in diets of numerous frugivores and are essential resources for local human communities, thus changes in fruit production could have cascading effects on ecosystems and the people who depend on them. In this study, we demonstrate that forest fruit production is shifting across tropical sites, with declining species-level trends occurring four times more frequently than increasing ones across a network of 17 sites. At two sites in west Africa, community-level fruit production has declined by 25% and 52% in recent decades, and fruit production is declining several sites in the Neotropics. Nevertheless, trends in fruit production are diverse across sites, and drivers of changes remain unidentified. While major spatial and temporal gaps in data coverage remain, by leveraging the expanding network of long-term monitoring, collaborative research can identify current trends in tropical fruit production and their drivers. This will enable robust predictions of future trends and advance our understanding of tropical forest vulnerability to environmental change. If the trends reported persist, they could induce important alteration in forest dynamics, impacting structural integrity, ecosystem functioning and species composition. https://doi.org/10.32942/X2404C Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences plant reproduction, climate change, Plant demographics, seed production, Flower production, Food availability, Forest recruitment Published: 2024-10-25 11:00 Last Updated: 2025-06-06 08:25 CC BY Attribution 4.0 International Conflict of interest statement: None Data and Code Availability Statement: Raw data can be found at https://github.com/JJFoest/MASTREEplus/ Language: English