DOI: 10.5061/dryad.v41ns1rwr
title: Supporting code, tables and data for: Megafrugivores as fading shadows of the past: Extant frugivores and the abiotic environment as the most important determinants of the distribution of palms in Madagascar

description: The extinction of all Madagascar’s megafrugivores ca. 1000 years ago, may
 have left its signature on the current distribution of
 vertebrate-dispersed plants across the island, due to the loss of
 effective seed dispersal. In this study, we dissect the roles of extinct
 and extant frugivore distributions, abiotic variables, human impact and
 spatial predictors on the compositional turnover, or beta-diversity, of
 palm (Arecaceae) species and their fruit sizes across 40 assemblages on
 Madagascar. Variation partitioning showed that palm beta-diversity is
 mostly shaped by the distribution of extant frugivores (8 lemur, 3 bird, 2
 rodent and 1 bat species) and the abiotic environment (e.g., forest cover,
 slope and temperature), and to a lesser extent by the distribution of
 extinct frugivores (5 giant lemur and 3 elephant bird species). However,
 the contribution of these variables differed between dry western
 assemblages and wet eastern assemblages, with a more prominent role,
 albeit still small, of extinct megafrugivores in the west. These results
 suggest that palm distributions in the dry west of Madagascar, where
 megafrugivores were probably most abundant in the past, still show
 signatures of past interactions. With a fourth-corner analysis we observed
 that the distribution of palm species with relatively large fruits and
 seeds was negatively associated with home range of extant mammalian
 frugivores and frugivore richness of both past and extant communities, and
 positively associated with the hand-wing index (HWI) – a proxy for
 dispersal ability - of extant bird communities. This suggests that palm
 species with relatively large fruits tend to occur in places with fewer,
 small-ranged mammalian frugivores, which may indicate dysfunctional seed
 dispersal, although a few wide-ranging bird species may compensate this
 loss by dispersing the seeds of small-to medium-sized palm fruits. Our
 results shed new light on anachronisms in Madagascar, and how defaunation
 and past interactions may underlie current plant distributions.
description: Please refer to the Methods section and Supplementary Information
 of the published article.
description: This data repository
 consists of the following folders and files: Main
 folder 
 Word
 document containing information on each file and instructions for
 use (<b>ReadMe.docx</b>) Excel document with 4
 different sheets, containing supplementary tables S1, S2 and S3 and their
 references (<b>TableS1_S2_S3.xlsx</b>)
 
 Supporting information for the
 manuscript
 (<strong>SupportingInformation.pdf</strong>)
 
 “data” folder Palm presence-absence
 data for each of the forty 0.3x0.3 grid cells
 (<b>Palms_in_grid03.csv</b>) Palm
 dispersal-related trait data (maximum stem height in meters, average fruit
 length in millimeters, average fruit width in millimeters, average seed
 length in millimeters and average seed width in millimeters) for the 165
 palm species appearing in the 40 grid cells
 (<b>PalmTraits.csv</b>) Average climatic,
 soil and human variables per grid cell
 (<b>Environment_grid03.csv</b>):
 Extant and
 extinct frugivore presence-absence data for each of the forty 0.3x0.3 grid
 cell (<b>frugivore_extant_extinct_in_grid03.csv</b>) Extant and extinct frugivore dispersal-related trait data (<b>frugivore_traits.csv</b>): Body mass in kilograms, hand-wing index (HWI) and home range in hectares. Geographic coordinates in Latitude and Longitude decimal degrees for the centroids of each of the forty 0.3x0.3 grid cell (<b>centroids_grid03.csv</b>) Shapefile of the forty 0.3x0.3 grid cell created in QGIS 3.10.7 used to extract all the other values (<b>0.3grid_20records</b>) <b>Metadata</b> <b>Average climatic, soil and human variables per grid cell (Environment_grid03.csv)</b> BIO1: Annual mean temperature (°C x 10) BIO4: Temperature seasonality (standard deviation ×100) BIO6: Minimum temperature of the coldest month (°C x 10) BIO12: Annual mean precipitation (mm x month-1) pet: Annual potential evapotranspiration from the Thornthwaite equation (mm) cwd: Annual climatic water deficit (mm) alt: Altitude (in m) slop: Slope in degrees solar: Solar radiation (in Wh.m-2.day-1)  percfor2010: Madagascar’s forest in 2010 was derived from the 30 m resolution 2000 forest map by Harper et al. (2007). Clay: Soil clay content (0-2 micrometre) in g/100g (w%) CationEC: Cation exchange capacity (CEC measured in 1 M NH4OAc buffered at pH 7) in cmolc/kg (fine earth)  Extractable_Aluminum: Extractable aluminium content (Al measured by Mehlich 3) in mg/kg (fine earth) Total_Nitrogen: Total nitrogen (N) content in g/kg of the fine earth fraction Total_Phosphorus: Total Phosphorus (P) content of the soil fine earth fraction in mg/kg (ppm)  Popdensity2010: “For all locations with more than 1000 people per km−2, we assigned a pressure score of 10. For more sparsely populated areas with densities lower than 1000 people·km−2, we logarithmically scaled the pressure score using: Pressure score = 3.333 × log(populationdensity+1)” (Venter et al. 2016). HFP2009: Human footprint for 2009, calculated as a summary value from other several human-related variables such as built environments, population density, night-time lights, croplands, pasture, roads, railways, navigable waterways. Roads: “We mapped the direct and indirect influence of roads by assigning a pressure score of 8 for 0.5 km out for either side of roads, and access pressures were awarded a score of 4 at 0.5 km and decaying exponentially out to 15 km either side of the road” (Venter et al. 2016)