Hazel Margaret Chapman

University of Canterbury | UC · School of Biological Sciences

We investigated the dietary preferences of chimpanzees residing in a Nigerian submontane forest using a combination of fecal analysis, observations of feeding remains, evidence from feeding tools and fruiting phenological data between April 2010 and March 2011. A total of 495 fecal samples were collected in which 52 fruit taxa were identified as ha...

Scatterhoarding by rodents, whereby seeds are collected and stored for later consumption, can result in seed dispersal. Seeds may be covered in litter on the forest floor (cached) or buried. This is particularly so in the Neotropics for large, nutritious seeds, and where primary dispersers are rare or missing. In African forests, contemporary anthr...

Highly plastic general-purpose genotypes are a frequent occurrence among invasive plants. Yet, it remains uncertain to what extent genetic adaptation can co-occur with such elevated levels of plasticity. Understanding the interplay between these two evolutionary strategies is essential to better predict invasive success and future climate change re...

Plant phenology directly drives population dynamics and forest productivity; it is also impacted by shifting environmental cues under climate change such as more prevalent drought. It is imperative to better understand how species and community phenology respond to climate change in leaf turnover and reproduction, both of which are required to inte...

The relative contribution of adaptation and phenotypic plasticity can vary between core and edge populations, with implications for invasive success. We investigated the spread of the invasive yellow monkeyflower, Erythranthe gutatta in New Zealand, where it is spreading from lowland agricultural land into high-elevation conservation areas. We inve...

Tree seedling dynamics underpin subsequent forest structure and diversity as different species/guilds respond variously to abiotic and biotic stresses. Thus, understanding differential seedling responses to stresses helps us to predict forest trajectories. Because forests vary in both environment and species composition, generalisations across trop...

Predicting how forest species composition may change in response to global change is essential for meaningful management. Which species are most likely to successfully recruit depends on a multitude of factors, but processes operating at the seed‐to‐seedling transition being especially important. Here, we explore how insufficient seed dispersal (di...

Evolutionary processes which increase the probability of an introduced plant species becoming invasive include high levels of genetic diversity and phenotypic plasticity. Naturalised in New Zealand, monkeyflower, ( Erythranthre gutatta ), a clonally spreading herb of waterways and seepage areas native to the Western USA, shows marked variation in a...

The identification of flowering plants using DNA barcoding proposed in last decades has slowly gained ground in Africa, where it has been successfully used to elucidate the systematics and ecology of several plant groups, and to understand their evolutionary history. Existing inferences on the effectiveness of DNA barcoding to identify African tree...

Significant gaps remain in understanding the response of plant reproduction to environmental change. This is partly because measuring reproduction in long-lived plants requires direct observation over many years and such datasets have rarely been made publicly available. Here we introduce MASTREE+, a dataset that collates reproductive time-series d...

The “hierarchy of factors” hypothesis states that decomposition rates are controlled primarily by climatic, followed by biological and soil variables. Tropical montane forests (TMF) are globally important ecosystems, yet there have been limited efforts to provide a biome‐scale characterization of litter decomposition. We designed a common litter de...

Brassica rapa L., is a crop grown globally and studies have indicated that insect pollination can improve yields. However, the importance of insect pollination in this crop depends on cultivar reproductive biology, insect pollinator species and their abundances. In Bangladesh, the acreage of B. rapa for oilseed production has been expanding, but li...

Background: Species diversity is a community attribute that is directly related to ecosystem productivity and trophic structure. Bird's choice of habitat and by extension their distribution depends largely on the availability of critical resources. Abundance and diversity assessment of sunbird species at Ngel Nyaki forest reserve was conducted duri...

Tropical forests store 40-50% of terrestrial vegetation carbon. Spatial variations in aboveground live tree biomass carbon (AGC) stocks remain poorly understood, in particular in tropical montane forests. Because of climatic and soil changes with increasing elevation, AGC stocks are lower in tropical montane compared to lowland forests. Here we ass...

Tropical forests store 40–50 per cent of terrestrial vegetation carbon1. However, spatial variations in aboveground live tree biomass carbon (AGC) stocks remain poorly understood, in particular in tropical montane forests2. Owing to climatic and soil changes with increasing elevation3, AGC stocks are lower in tropical montane forests compared with...

To what extent birds provide the ecosystem service of pest control in subsistence farms, and how this service might depend on retained natural habitats near farmlands is unexplored in West Africa. To fill this knowledge gap, we placed plasticine mimics of insect pests on experimentally grown crops on the Mambilla Plateau, South Eastern Nigeria. We...

Restoration of Afromontane forests is critical because of their biodiversity richness and ecosystem service provision. With an evolutionary history of rapid forest migration into grassland in response to shifting climate, traits of Afromontane forests such as a high frequency of light tolerant, small fruited, and bird dispersed species may pre‐adap...

Arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) and ectomycorrhizal (EcM) associations are critical for host-tree performance. However, how mycorrhizal associations correlate with the latitudinal tree beta-diversity remains untested. Using a global dataset of 45 forest plots representing 2,804,270 trees across 3840 species, we test how AM and EcM trees contribute to t...

Myrmecochory, the dispersal of seeds with lipid-rich appendages by ants, is a significant ant–plant interaction. Less well understood is the potential for ant dispersal of non-myrmecochorous seeds. Here we investigate ant–diaspore interactions in a West African montane habitat. We combine observation with depot experiments to determine ant species...

We test the hypothesis that the tree species previously known as Deinbollia sp. 2 . is a new species for science. We formally characterise and name this species as Deinbollia onanae (Sapindaceae-Litchi clade) and we discuss it in the context of the assemblage of montane tree species in the Cameroon Highlands of West-Central Africa. The new species...

Questions A leading hypothesis for species coexistence in species‐rich, lowland tropical forests is conspecific negative density dependence (CNDD), driven by host‐specific pests and pathogens and competition for available resources. The extent to which this applies to Afromontane forests with relatively low diversity, a high frequency of single‐spe...

Global conversion of patches of natural vegetation into agricultural land is reducing the ecosystem services provided by natural patches dwelling species to farmers. For sub-Saharan African subsistence farmers, such a reduction in pest control services by birds may be a significant disadvantage. Here we explored to what extent birds provide pest co...

ForestGEO is a network of scientists and long-term forest dynamics plots (FDPs) spanning the Earth's major forest types. ForestGEO's mission is to advance understanding of the diversity and dynamics of forests and to strengthen global capacity for forest science research. ForestGEO is unique among forest plot networks in its large-scale plot dimens...

Litter decomposition plays a central role in carbon and nutrient cycling, including ecosystem productivity, soil physicochemical properties, the structure of soil organism communities, and the dynamics of food webs. The "hierarchy of factors" hypothesis that states that on a global scale, decomposition rates are controlled primarily by climatic, fo...

Rodents can be important in seed dispersal through their scatterhoarding behaviour, yet, the seed traits that are most influential in seed removal by Afrotropical scatterhoarding rodents remains unclear. Here, we investigated the effect of seed size and nutrient content of four seed species on the scatterhoarding behaviour of rodents in an Afromont...

New Zealand's intensive pastures, comprised almost entirely introduced Lolium L. and Trifolium L. species, are arguably the most productive grazing-lands in the world. However, these areas are vulnerable to destructive invasive pest species. Of these, three of the most damaging pests are weevils (Coleoptera: Curculionidae) that have relatively rece...

Local factors can play an important role in defining tree species distributions in species rich tropical forests. To what extent the same applies to relatively small, species poor West African montane forests is unknown. Here, forests survive in a grassland matrix and fire has played a key role in their spatial and temporal dynamics since the Mioce...

How rodents perceive predation risk may alter their seed foraging behaviour and therefore potentially influence the recruitment of tree species. In this study we used two methods to investigate the effect of predation risk on habitat use by the African giant pouched rat (Cricetomys sp. nov) in Ngel Nyaki forest reserve, Nigeria. The first method wa...

Context Isolated pasture trees play an important role in forest recovery within fragmented tropical landscapes by attracting seed dispersers and facilitating seedling growth. However, studies with conflicting results have led to confusion about what drives variation in zoochorous-dispersed seed rain patterns under isolated tree canopies. Objective...

Sunbirds play a major role in the pollination of Old World nectivorous plants. However, with the exception of the Cape Floristic Region there is a major knowledge gap around African nectivore interaction networks—a stark contrast from the abundance of neotropical hummingbird–plant networks. Here, we describe a sunbird pollen transfer network (PTN)...

Climate is widely recognised as an important determinant of the latitudinal diversity gradient. However, most existing studies make no distinction between direct and indirect effects of climate, which substantially hinders our understanding of how climate constrains biodiversity globally. Using data from 35 large forest plots, we test hypothesised...

Climate is widely recognised as an important determinant of the latitudinal diversity gradient. However, most existing studies make no distinction between direct and indirect effects of climate, which substantially hinders our understanding of how climate constrains biodiversity globally. Using data from 35 large forest plots, we test hypothesised...

The 3340 ha Tara Hills high-country station near Omarama was a Government owned research facilitybetween 1948 and 2005. Here we present the story of the rise and fall of Tara Hills; turned from a depletedwasteland into the vibrant research centre of the 1980s, it was eventually sold to commercial interests in theearly 2000s. By the early 1980s, Tar...

Amphibians are the vertebrate group with the highest number of species threatened with extinction, and habitat loss and fragmentation are considered to be among the leading causes of their declines and extinctions. Little is known of the population biology of amphibian species inhabiting montane forests in Central and West Africa, where anthropogen...

Raw data of Cardioglossa schioetzi and Leptodactylodon bicolor. Together, the two preferred primer combinations ESP1B/MSP3 and ESP1B/MSP6 yielded 275 loci for the 198 samples representing both species. (XLSX)

Outcomes from structure without using population data for Leptodactylodon bicolor. Graph (A) and bar plot (C) depict the optimal K based on the Ln(K) K = 7, whereas graph (B) and bar plot (D) show the better K based on Evanno‘s method ΔK = 2. Each vertical bar represents an individual for which is shown the proportional genetic assignment to each c...

Outcomes from structure without using population data for Cardioglossa schioetzi. Graph A) and bar plot C) depict the optimal K based on the Ln(K) K = 5, whereas graph B) and bar plot D) show the better K based on Evanno‘s method ΔK = 2. Each vertical bar represents an individual for which is shown the proportional genetic assignment to each cluste...

The New Zealand flora comprises proportionately more alien species than anywhere else on Earth. Many of these species are ‘sleeper’ species, currently not invasive but with the potential to become so. Understanding what traits lead to sleepers becoming invasive is a key question in invasion biology. One hypothesis is local adaptation – that is, sel...

The study of avian integumentary colouration can offer insight into dietary and metabolic processes as well as fitness in focal species. Yet, we know relatively less about the system of feather colouration in African birds in comparison to Europe, North America and the neotropics. In this study, we biochemically characterised and quantified the pig...

The interaction between granivorous scatterhoarding mammals and plants is a conditional mutualism: scatterhoarders consume seeds (acting as predators), but the movement of seed by scatterhoarders may contribute to dispersal (acting as mutualists). Understanding the ecological factors that shape this relationship is highly relevant in anthropogenica...

Benthic invertebrate communities have been shown to respond to habitat degradation as a result of land use changes. Although these changes have been well documented in temperate regions, their effects in the tropics have been poorly documented particularly where land use activities differ markedly (e.g., tea, maize and plantations). A survey 55 1st...

This report summarises the achievements of the Nigerian Montane Forest Project over 2017

Afromontane forest ecosystems are highly diverse in both flora and fauna species. Information on species composition and distribution are necessary for adequate conservation strategy. An extensive survey, which is often time consuming and labor-intensive, is required for the assessment of such ecosystems. Remote sensing platforms is an inexpensive...

Mapping deforestation is a common feature of remote sensing and geographic information systems. However, understanding deforestation patterns (time of occurrence, with dates and sometimes precise timing) is a paradigm shift from the usual deforestation mapping. This study uses a web-based Earth Observation Monitoring system developed at Friedrich S...

The Cross River State Government in Nigeria is proposing to construct a “Cross River Superhighway” that would bisect critical remaining areas of tropical rainforest in south eastern Nigeria. We offer and evaluate two alternative routes to the superhighway that would be less damaging to forests, protected areas, and biological diversity. The first a...

Metagenomic approaches are rapidly expanding our knowledge of the diversity of viruses. In the fecal matter of Nigerian chimpanzees we recovered three gokushovirus genomes, one circular replication-associated protein encoding single-stranded DNA virus (CRESS), and a CRESS DNA molecule.

Understanding nest site choice by chimpanzees has implications for ecology, anthropology, and in the collection of census data, yet it remains controversial. Here we provide the first information on environmental factors affecting nest site choice in a montane population of the rare and relatively understudied Nigerian/Cameroon chimpanzee (Pan trog...

Animal pollinators and the plants they pollinate depend on networks of mutualistic partnerships and more broadly on the stability of such networks. Based mainly on insect-plant visitation networks, theory predicts that species that are most prone to extinction contribute the most to nestedness, however empirical tests are rare. We used a sunbird-tr...

Flower web data. (CSV)

http://www.afromontane.canterbury.ac.nz/documents/annual-reports/NMFP-16-Annual-Report-web.pdf

Seed-dispersal ecology in tropical montane forests (TMF) differs in some predictable ways from tropical lowland forests (TLF). Environmental, biogeographic and biotic factors together shape dispersal syndromes which in turn influence forest structure and community composition. Data on diaspore traits along five elevational gradients from forests in...

The montane forests of south-eastern Nigeria are of immense conservation value due to their high levels of biodiversity and endemism. Yet despite increasing anthropogenic disturbance and forest fragmentation, little is known about the genetics of resident tree populations. We used a set of conserved chloroplast simple sequence repeat (SSR) primers...

Large-seeded trees are often heavily dependent on animals to disperse their seeds. However, this also makes them highly sensitive to declines in frugivores. Our study species, Cordia millenii (Boraginaceae), is dispersed primarily by chimpanzees. Apparently low recruitment in our study site, Ngel Nyaki Forest (Mambilla Pleateau, Taraba State, Niger...

Taraba State, Nigeria, is an important conservation site for the Endangered Nigeria–Cameroon chimpanzee Pan troglodytes ellioti . Gashaka Gumti National Park, Nigeria's largest national park and home to potentially the largest contiguous population of the Nigeria–Cameroon chimpanzee, spans a significant portion of the eastern sector of Taraba and t...

We investigate aspects of recruitment ecology and population genetics of a poorly regenerating tree, Cordia millenii (Boraginaceae), on the Mambilla Plateau (a montane region in south-east Nigeria). Fruit of C. millenii is an important food source for chimpanzees, who are also the primary dispersers of its large seeds. Increasing anthropogenic de...

Lepidium castellanum, L. juvencum and L. oleraceum are threatened coastal cresses endemic to New Zealand. These three species were selfed and interspecific hybrids generated for examination of hybrid fitness and inbreeding depression. In controlled glasshouse experiments, the interspecific hybrids and selfed progeny were inoculated with a strain of...

The Afromontane forest of the Mambilla Plateau is an important ecological ecosystem for Nigeria. The ecosystem is endowed with flora and fauna species. The study focused on the carbon sequestration potential of the forest ecosystem which was poorly understood. High resolution QuickBird imagery with forest inventory data and a digital elevation mode...

Regional variations in tool use among chimpanzee subspecies and between populations within the same subspecies can often be explained by ecological constraints, although cultural variation also occurs. In this study we provide data on tool use by a small, recently isolated population of the endangered Nigeria–Cameroon chimpanzee Pan troglodytes ell...

The effectiveness of chimpanzees as seed dispersers may be influenced by the secondary removal and/or dispersal of seeds by other taxa. This study documents species involvement and their influences on seed treatments (fresh seed, dry seed and seeds rubbed in fresh chimpanzee faeces). Field experiments conducted on ten large-seed species consumed by...

Nigeria’s montane forests fall within the Cameroon Highlands Ecoregion and are exceptionally rich in endemic taxa including amphibians. The montane forests on the Mambilla Plateau, Nigeria, are of such limited extent that their small and isolated populations of endemic species are at high risk of extinction. At the Ngel Nyaki Forest Reserve, where...

Intro West African biota are less well characterised in terms of their species diversity and ecology relative to other geographic locales in Africa and tropics in general (Norris et al. 2010). We chose two tree species, Lovoa trichilioides (Meliaceae) and a Cordia sp. (Boraginaceae), to understand ecologic and genetic processes affecting Afromontan...

Pollination mutualisms are essential for tropical forests, but are threatened by forest fragmentation and degradation, which can lead to decline and loss of pollinator species. We studied the avian pollinators of three West African montane forest tree species, Anthonotha noldeae (dependent on birds for pollination), Anthocleista vogelii and Croton...

To date, most research conducted on plant viruses has centred on agricultural systems where viruses greatly reduce economic output. Introduced viruses are globally common and there is a lack of knowledge around how they might affect natural populations. Although it has been suggested that infectious disease may have played an underestimated role in...

To date, most research conducted on plant viruses has centred on agricultural systems where viruses greatly reduce economic output. Introduced viruses are globally common and there is a lack of knowledge around how they might affect natural populations. Although it has been suggested that infectious disease may have played an underestimated role in...

The four non-human primates found on the Nigerian Montane Forest Project at Ngel-Nyaki, Taraba State were surveyed for seven days to describe their food ecology. Direct field observation of what they eat and scat (faecal droppings) were used for the study. Over forty (40) plants that served as food were identified with commonest food being Ficus sp...

The present paper reviews mechanisms producing complicated patterns of variation withinHieracium subgen.Pilosella. The taxonomic complexity of this subgenus is due to highly variable basic species and intermediate (hybridogenous) species. The most important sources of variation are polyploidy, hybridization and (mostly) facultative apomixis of the...