
Christopher N. Kaiser-BunburyUniversity of Exeter | UoE · Department of Biosciences
Christopher N. Kaiser-Bunbury
PhD, University of Zurich
About
95
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Introduction
I'm an ecologist interested in ecological resilience and evolutionary processes on islands to assess ecosystem responses to human-mediated environmental change. Specifically, I study spatial and temporal variation in biotic interactions on the community level under different disturbance regimes.
Additional affiliations
September 2017 - February 2018
September 2010 - January 2013
February 2013 - August 2017
Publications
Publications (95)
Integrating diverse trees and shrubs (hereafter ‘trees’) in agricultural landscapes has emerged as a crucial nature‐based solution to the triple challenge of biodiversity loss, climate change and food security. The potential benefits of on‐farm trees for both people and nature, however, are often constrained by inadequate consideration of local soc...
Tree plantations are considered as a solution to reduce the impacts of climate change and can enhance biodiversity. Consequently, many tree planting schemes around the world have been started to achieve these dual objectives.
However, many of these tree plantations are being implemented without proper design or post‐plantation management, often ove...
Plant–pollinator interactions are ecologically and economically important, and, as a result, their prediction is a crucial theoretical and applied goal for ecologists. Although various analytical methods are available, we still have a limited ability to predict plant–pollinator interactions. The predictive ability of different plant–pollinator inte...
Effective conservation of ecological communities requires accurate and up-to-date information about whether species are persisting or declining to extinction. The persistence of an ecological community is supported by its underlying network of species interactions. While the persistence of the network supporting the whole community is the most rele...
Land degradation results in declining biodiversity and the disruption of ecosystem functioning worldwide, particularly in the tropics. Vegetation restoration is a common tool used to mitigate these impacts and increasingly aims to restore ecosystem functions rather than species diversity. However, evidence from community experiments on the effect o...
Plant-pollinator interactions are critical to terrestrial ecosystem functioning and global food production but are experiencing increasing pressures from land use and global environmental changes. Plant functional traits and vegetation structure reflect the responses of vegetation to local environmental pressures and relate directly to the nesting...
When non‐native species invade ecosystems, coevolved plant–animal interactions and associated ecological functions are altered, often to the detriment of local biodiversity. While mutualistic interactions can benefit from—and assist with—ecological restoration through the removal of non‐native species, community‐level changes in antagonistic intera...
1. Pollinator diversity and abundance are under direct threat from human activities. Despite societal dependence on pollinators for crop production, humankind continues to drive pollinator declines through agricultural intensification and urbanisation.
2. Urban environments can provide refuge to some pollinators. There is a need, however , to unde...
We monitored leaf production in seedlings, trunkless juvenile, immature, and mature male and female plants of the dioecious palm, Lodoicea maldivica , and studied how internode length changed with trunk height. The fieldwork was conducted in closed forest on Praslin Island and degraded forest on Curieuse Island. Data on numbers of leaves produced a...
We studied spatial patterns of kinship in the offspring of the endangered Lodoicea maldivica, a dioecious palm that produces the largest seed of any plant. Previous research has suggested that restricted seed and pollen dispersal in populations resulted in strong spatial genetic structure. We used microsatellites to genotype young plants and their...
Human‐mediated environmental change transforms ecosystems worldwide. Understanding the detailed impact of these unprecedented changes on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, however, is challenging. Meadow ecosystems on the Tibetan Plateau transform as a result of climate change and anthropogenic disturbances. Evaluating the consequences of thes...
Ants are amongst the most successful invaders worldwide and can markedly modify invaded communities through biotic interactions. Invasive ants, for example, can compete with native pollinators for resources, act as legitimate pollinators, or disrupt plant-pollinator mutualistic interactions, thereby affecting native plant reproduction. Ecological r...
The cover image is based on the paper "Seed dispersal by frugivores from forest remnants promotes the regeneration of adjacent invaded forests in an oceanic island" Costa et al. 2022 (https://doi.org/10.1111/rec.13654). Picture description: Seychelles Blue Pigeon (Alectroenas pulcherrima), one of the main endemic frugivorous birds on the island of...
Aim
Mutualistic interactions between plants and animals are fundamental for the maintenance of natural communities and the ecosystem services they provide. However, particularly in human‐dominated island ecosystems, introduced species may alter mutualistic interactions. Based on an extensive dataset of plant–frugivore interactions, we mapped and an...
Invasive non‐native species can alter animal‐mediated seed dispersal interactions and ultimately affect the stability of recipient communities. The degree of such disturbances, however, is highly variable and depends on several factors, two of which have received little attention: the relative timing of native and non‐native fruiting phenologies, a...
Effective conservation of ecological communities requires accurate and up-to-date information about whether species are persisting or declining to extinction. The persistence of ecological communities is largely supported by its structured architecture of species interactions, known as an ecological network. While the persistence of the network sup...
Forest remnants often act as refuges for native plant species within a degraded and highly fragmented forest matrix. Understanding whether these native patches can function as feeding grounds for frugivores and seed sources for native plant dispersal into the surrounding forest can provide critical information on ecosystem functions on a landscape...
As the COVID‐19 pandemic continues to affect societies across the world, the ongoing economic and social disruptions are likely to present fundamental challenges for current and future biodiversity conservation.
We review the literature for outcomes of past major societal, political, economic and zoonotic perturbations on biodiversity conservation,...
Ecological restoration is widely used to mitigate the negative impacts of anthropogenic activities. There is an increasing demand to identify suitable restoration management strategies for specific habitat and disturbance types to restore interactions between organisms of degraded habitats, such as pollination. In the Tibetan Plateau, alpine meadow...
Ecological restoration is widely used to mitigate the negative impacts of anthropogenic activities. There is an increasing demand to identify suitable restoration management strategies for specific habitat and disturbance types to restore interactions between organisms of degraded habitats, such as pollination. In the Tibetan Plateau, alpine meadow...
This book contains 23 chapters divided into seven parts. Part I reviews the key hypotheses in invasion ecology that invoke biotic interactions to explain aspects of plant invasion dynamics; and reviews models, theories and hypotheses on how invasion performance and impact of introduced species in recipient ecosystems can be conjectured according to...
Most studies of plant–animal mutualistic networks have come from a temporally static perspective. This approach has revealed general patterns in network structure, but limits our ability to understand the ecological and evolutionary processes that shape these networks and to predict the consequences of natural and human‐driven disturbance on specie...
Premise:
Opportunistic nectar-feeders may act as effective pollinators; nonetheless, we still lack information on whether these opportunistic species differ in their pollination effectiveness from specialized nectarivorous vertebrates and insects. Many nectar specialists have coevolved with the plants on which they feed; therefore, we would expect...
The study of mutualistic interaction networks has led to valuable insights into ecological and evolutionary processes. However, our understanding of network structure may depend upon the temporal scale at which we sample and analyze network data. To date, we lack a comprehensive assessment of the temporal scale‐dependence of network structure acros...
Lodoicea maldivica (coco de mer) is a long-lived dioecious palm in which male and female plants are visually indistinguishable when immature, only becoming sexually dimorphic as adults, which in natural forest can take as much as 50 years. Most adult populations in the Seychelles exhibit biased sex ratios, but it is unknown whether this is due to d...
This book contains 23 chapters divided into seven parts. Part I reviews the key hypotheses in invasion ecology that invoke biotic interactions to explain aspects of plant invasion dynamics; and reviews models, theories and hypotheses on how invasion performance and impact of introduced species in recipient ecosystems can be conjectured according to...
The rate of non-native species introductions continues to increase, with directionality from continents to islands. It is no longer single species but entire networks of coevolved and newly interacting continental species that are establishing on islands. The consequences of multispecies introductions on the population dynamics and interactions of...
Background and Aims Large clades of angiosperms are often characterized by diverse interactions with pol-linators, but how these pollination systems are structured phylogenetically and biogeographically is still uncertain for most families. Apocynaceae is a clade of >5300 species with a worldwide distribution. A database representing >10 % of speci...
A double mutualism (DM) occurs when two interacting species benefit each other in two different functions, e.g. when an animal species acts both as pollinator and seed disperser of the same plant. Besides the double benefit, a DM also imposes a larger risk to both functions if the performance of one partner declines. We conducted the first global r...
The fine-scale spatial genetic structure (FSGS) of plant populations is strongly influenced by patterns of seed dispersal. An extreme case of limited dispersal is found in the charismatic yet endangered palm Lodoicea maldivica, which produces large fruits (up to 20 kg) dispersed only by gravity. To investigate patterns of seed dispersal and FSGS in...
Ants are probably the most dominant insect family on earth, and flowering plants have been the dominant plant group on land for more than 100 million years. In recent decades, human activities have degraded natural environments with unparalleled speed and scale, making it increasingly apparent that interspecific interactions vary not only under dif...
Habitat degradation can reduce or even prevent the reproduction of previously abundant plant species. To develop appropriate management strategies, we need to understand the reasons for reduced recruitment in degraded ecosystems. The dioecious coco de mer palm (Lodoicea maldivica) produces by far the largest seeds of any plant. It is a keystone spe...
Aims The 50th anniversary of the publication of the seminal book, The Theory of Island Biogeography, by Robert H. MacArthur and Edward O. Wilson is a timely moment to review and identify key research foci that could advance island biology. Here, we take a collaborative horizon-scanning approach to identify 50 fundamental questions for the continued...
Research on the genetic variability across various organisms from the Seychelles granitic islands has revealed considerable differentiation within many taxa, often with deep evolutionary lineages, likely corresponding to cryptic species. Although an accurate description of insular diversity is important for biogeographical and conservation reasons,...
• Premise of the study: The evolutionarily and ecologically distinct coco de mer palm Lodoicea maldivica (Arecaceae) is endemic to two islands in the Seychelles. Before colonization of the islands by man, the endangered palm formed large monodominant stands, but its natural range is now restricted to four main populations and several patches of iso...
Ecological networks are a useful tool to study the complexity of biotic interactions at a community level. Advances in the understanding of network patterns encourage the application of a network approach in other disciplines than theoretical ecology, such as biodiversity conservation. So far, however, practical applications have been meagre. Here...
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Animal-mediated seed dispersal is an important ecological function in many ecosystems worldwide. Obtaining a detailed understanding of this process at a community level in species-rich ecosystems, based on experimental evaluations of all pairwise interactions, is a Herculean task....
Questions
Which physical or chemical removal method is most effective in controlling woody invasive alien plant ( IAP ) species in sensitive conservation areas, while minimizing the impact on different life stages of native plant communities? Is there a distinct influence of removal method on successional trajectories of post‐treatment seedling com...
The iconic Lodoicea maldivica palm appears to invest heavily in reproduction, with females bearing the world's largest seeds and males producing copious pollen. We asked how these palms, which grow in extremely poor soils, obtain sufficient nutrients to support such high levels of reproductive function. Our study site was the Vallée de Mai UNESCO S...
The following Supporting Information is available for this article: Fig. S1 Inter-and intraspecific differences of effects of palm trees on spatial distribution of water and soil nutrients. Table S1 Model results testing the influence of distance to the base of a tree on soil moisture among three plant species Table S2 Model results testing the inf...
Sisal Agave sisalana is an invasive alien plant species of concern at the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Aldabra Atoll in the Seychelles. Physical control efforts since the 1970s to remove sisal from Aldabra have only been partially successful because the roots cannot be completely removed, resulting in continuous control efforts. We conducted a sev...
Identifying the determinants of biological interactions in mutualistic networks
is key to understanding the rules that govern the organization of biodiversity. We used
structural equation modeling and dissimilarities in nine ecological variables to investigate
community processes underlying the turnover of species and their interaction frequencies...
Long-distance gene flow is thought to be one prerequisite for the persistence of plant species in fragmented environments. Human influences have led to severe fragmentation of native habitats in the Seychelles islands, with many species surviving only in small and isolated populations. The endangered Seychelles endemic tree Glionnetia sericea is re...
Much has been written about bridging the implementation gap, also known as the ‘great divide’ or the ‘knowledge-action boundary’ (e.g. Gibbons et al. 2008; Arlettaz et al. 2010; Cook et al. 2013). Most of these authors make valid and needed points concerning the application of science to conservation management, including the proposal of conceptual...
Co-flowering plant species commonly share flower visitors, and thus have the potential to influence each other's pollination. In this study we analysed 750 quantitative plant-pollinator networks from 28 studies representing diverse biomes worldwide. We show that the potential for one plant species to influence another indirectly via shared pollinat...
The mature palm forest of the Vallée de Mai, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, on the Seychelles island of Praslin, is a unique ecosystem containing many endemic species, including the iconic coco de mer palm Lodoicea maldivica. In 2009, the invasive yellow crazy ant Anoplolepis gracilipes was recorded for the first time within the palm forest, raising...
We introduce a framework – based on experiences from oceanic islands – for conserving biodiversity in the
Anthropocene. In an increasingly human-dominated world, the context for conservation-oriented action is
extremely variable, attributable to three largely independent factors: the degree of anthropogenic change,
the importance of deliberate vers...
Biodiversity is organised into complex ecological networks of interacting species in local ecosystems, but our knowledge about the effects of habitat fragmentation on such systems remains limited. We consider the effects of this key driver of both local and global change on both mutualistic and antagonistic systems at different levels of biological...