Figure 1.
Study area and sampling design.
A) Geographical location of the O Courel Mountains (NW Spain) showing the location of the three landscapes (valleys) included in this study (Seceda, Parada and Ferramulín). B) Sampling design of the study. C) Pictures of the three habitat types considered in this study. The figure shows the general spatial organization of the three different habitat types within each landscape. Broken lines represent the different transects made for sampling both carnivore faeces and plant abundance.
Table 1.
Descriptive statistics of the 14 fleshy-fruited species consumed by carnivorous mammals in O Courel Mountains (NW Spain) during the 2007–2008 fruiting season (August to January), all studied sites and months combined.
Figure 2.
Temporal variation of fruit consumption (% seed occurrence in faeces) by carnivores of wild and cultivated fleshy-fruits.
Percentages were calculated over the total number of faeces (i.e. the whole diet). Numbers below the months denote the number of faeces collected in each survey. Note that we included data from May 2008 (n faeces = 166; out of this study) to show the whole annual variation of fruit consumption.
Figure 3.
Temporal variation (August to January) of fruit consumption (% seed occurrence in faeces) by carnivores of different fleshy-fruited species.
Note that contrary to figure 2 percentages were calculated over the number of faeces containing seeds (i.e. the frugivorous diet).
Figure 4.
Patterns of seed deposition by carnivores at different spatial scales (landscapes and habitat types) showing the values (mean ± SE) for the frequency of seed deposition of fleshy-fruited species (all pooled), and wild and cultivated species.
Superscripts denote the diet for which frequency of seed deposition was calculated; 1: whole diet, n = total faeces collected; 2: frugivorous diet, n = faeces containing seeds.
Table 2.
Results of Generalized Linear Models (GLMs) analyzing the effect of landscape and habitat types on seed deposition by carnivorous mammals in O Courel Mountains (NW Spain) during the 2007–2008 fruiting season, considering separately the presence in faeces of seeds from all fleshy-fruited species, wild or cultivated species and different fleshy-fruited species.
Figure 5.
Patterns of seed deposition by carnivores at different spatial scales (landscapes and habitat types) showing the values (mean ± SE) for the frequency of seed deposition of different fleshy-fruited species.
Table 3.
Values and significance level of the Spearman rank correlation coefficients between seed deposition by carnivorous mammals, both in relative (% of occurrence in faeces) and absolute (number of seeds and faeces km−1) terms, and the local abundance of different fleshy-fruited species (density or cover) at the 9 sampling sites.